The Story
Where Science
Meets Human Care
This path didn't start cleanly. I failed high school — not by a lot, but enough that a direct route into medicine was off the table. I took a gap year: the first half spent resubmitting school assignments to rescue my grades, training for the Underwater Hockey Age-group World Championships, and working café shifts to save enough money to get there. The second half of that year I spent in Israel, volunteering on ambulances — responding to real emergencies, riding alongside paramedics and witnessing the raw weight of critical life and death moments. That experience didn't just inspire me. It decided things for me.
I came home and enrolled in First Year Health Sciences at the University of Auckland, aiming for medical school entry the following year. My grades weren't high enough, and I didn't make the cut. So I moved into a Sports Science degree — building the academic record and the scientific foundation that medicine would demand, and setting my sights on graduate entry instead. I missed out again. There were four applications across several years before the University of Otago finally said yes.
That persistence shaped everything about how I practise. Years of rigorous study, clinical placements, and hospital training at Otago produced not just a degree, but a doctor who had already learned that the hardest things worth doing rarely come easily.
Working across hospital environments since graduating, I've developed a deep passion for critical care and emergency medicine — the high-stakes, high-pressure environments where decisions carry real weight, and where the intersection of science and humanity is most raw and most real.
The goal driving everything forward: rescue helicopters. Delivering advanced pre-hospital care in the most challenging environments imaginable. It's the natural convergence of emergency medicine, military training, and a belief that difficulty is always worth embracing.
"Medicine teaches you that every decision has weight — and that the system is only as good as the people within it."
— Jason Hart
