I enjoyed mathematics at school but I never envisaged studying it at university, and didn’t even know medical statistics existed! I’d always had a strong interest in medicine, but was more interested in the research side rather than clinical. I started a BSc in Biochemistry at the University of Bristol in 2011, but found I was much more interested in mathematics and statistics than lab work. As a result, I changed to a BSc in Mathematics, and it was the units in statistics and probability that really grabbed my attention. I love reading, and found books and blog posts from authors such as Ben Goldacre and David Speigelhalter fascinating, as they illustrated how the mathematics I was learning on my course could be used to understand real life problems, particularly in medicine. After graduating, I was awarded a Pre-Doctoral Research Methods Fellowship from the National Institute of Health Research. This fellowship provided me with the funding to study an MSc in Medical Statistics at the University of Leicester. I have now graduated and have been working as a Research Associate in Medical Statistics at the University of Bristol for a year, and will be starting a PhD in Medical Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in October 2017. For me, the best thing about being a medical statistician is being able to use my mathematics skills every day as part of a multidisciplinary team, consisting of clinicians, epidemiologists and many more, with the ultimate goal of improving public health and clinical practice.