It’s always good to catch up with our medical students over their extracurricular activities. Considering the course is such a busy one our students still have time to develop hobbies and pursuits that enable them to take a break from their medical studies.

Third year student Manvir Dobb is one such student who has developed a love of portraiture and was featured recently on the Sky Arts programme Portrait Artist of the Year in the first heat.

“I have always been interested in art but didn’t take it too seriously to start with,” she says. “Around the age of 14 I had a teacher who piqued my interest and nurtured my creative side. It has now become a part of my life and even more important for my well-being while studying on an intense course and preparing to go into the NHS.”

Manvir applied for Portrait Artist of the Year on Sky Arts early this year with a self-portrait she’d created during lockdown using oils and acrylics. She was delighted to get the call to say she had been accepted and then in March she filmed her heat.

“We were given four hours to paint a celebrity sitter, historian Dan Snow. As my first degree was history and Spanish, this fitted well. He was a really fun and entertaining subject to paint.”

On being asked how she felt about painting on TV, she says: “I found the whole experience a bit scary as it isn’t a natural environment to paint in, although everyone on the show was attentive and supportive. I was able to take my friends, which helped, and the fellow competitors were really friendly. While I didn’t win my heat I found it a really positive experience.”

Although this was the first national competition that Manvir had entered, she had also been involved with the WMS annual year 1 anatomy painting competition that is open to all medical students, which she also found to be a fun challenge.

Manvir only decided to pursue medicine towards the end of her history and Spanish undergraduate degree. She said, “Covid had a big impact on how I viewed healthcare and the role I wanted to play in it. There were a number of other factors too, including my mum being ill with cancer, which made me reassess how I wanted to help people. I didn’t have a science background coming onto the course and because Warwick includes students from different courses there are lots of different personalities and experiences, which is great.”

In phase 3 now there is a little while to go until the end of her studies and Manvir is remaining open minded about future specialisms but is currently interested in psychiatry, obstetrics, and gynaecology. Wherever her future medical career takes her, it is clear her painting will remain an important part of her life.