Organising your medical portfolio: why I built MedPortfolio

When I was in medical school and started becoming interested in sport and exercise medicine (SEM), one thing quickly became apparent when I took a look at doctors who work in SEM. It takes a lot of work and is very competitive.

Medical students and resident doctors are expected to have more and more competitive portfolios. Teaching. Research. Conferences. Courses. Audits. Awards. Shadowing. Society positions. The list of what you can do and achieve, even early in your medical career, is really endless.

I was fortunate I found the time to be able to complete some of these and achieve some of these achievements. When I did, however, I found that I didn't really know what on earth I did with whatever evidence I received (if I even did receive any).

So I did what any at least self-proclaimed 'organised' medical student did. I put it all in an organised folder and took the time to label it all nicely. On my computer, and eventually, in a Google Drive somewhere. And this works. It works alright, in fact. I just couldn't scratch the itch that there could be a better way of storing and tracking all the evidence of these great things medical students and doctors are doing.

So I spent my summer learning how to vibecode and built medportfolio.co.uk. It fixes the issue I've just described. Easy storage of your evidence for what you've done, categorised into what's relevant for the medical portfolio. It's been a game-changer for me in terms of being more organised, and has even reminded me to send that email to get some evidence for things I've done that I never received a letter or certificate for.

They might not seem too important now, but down the line, when applying for specialty training or jobs, the evidence you have is going to be required. And I hate to break it to you, but by that point your student email would have closed down a long time ago.

But I wanted MedPortfolio to go beyond that. MedPortfolio can track things before you've done them. You can set yourself to-do tasks, from approaching that supervisor all the way through to applying to that journal for publication. When busy just trying to survive the syllabus and focused on heavy exam periods, it can be nice to come back to a tracker that just lets you know where to pick up from.

In addition, I wanted MedPortfolio to fix another issue for me: the CV. High-achieving students and doctors will be approaching numerous supervisors, opportunities and schemes on a regular basis. For that, you frequently need an up-to-date CV. I'd hate going into Google Docs or Word, looking at my last CV, and thinking to myself, 'What have I actually done in the last 12 months?' And it wasn't because I'd done little; it was that I'd be worried I was forgetting something and never claiming any credit for it. MedPortfolio solves this. Your CV live-updates directly from your portfolio, with customisable styling and organisation at every step.

Furthermore, you might not always want your CV to look the same. If I take my situation, for example, I'd often want a CV to send for opportunities relating to SEM, but things I'd done solely in other areas such as MedTech didn't seem relevant enough to have on the CV. The same is true for the flip side. When I wanted to apply for a MedTech opportunity, my shadowing of SEM doctors didn't really make sense to include. So the CV builder can have multiple different CVs, each including different items set by your own filters.

I'm very excited by the take-up so far, and it's free for anyone to try! I hope that if you do have a look, you find it useful, and any feedback can be submitted through the site in settings. If you're interested in SEM, I'm confident you'll find it a better solution than whatever portfolio organisation system you have going on right now!