Prizology Is Now Live — Reflections from the Journey
By Abrar Hassan on 25th November 2025
What started as a late-night frustration trying to find essay competitions has turned into a platform used across the country. Now that Prizology officially leaves beta, I wanted to share what it actually took to get here.
Leaving Public Beta
When I first began building Prizology, I had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went. I only knew one thing: there had to be an easier way for medical students to find opportunities. I was sitting at my desk one evening, flicking between scattered PDFs, outdated web pages and broken links, wondering how something so important could be so chaotic. Somewhere between that frustration and the moment I opened my editor, Prizology began.
The early days were messy. I underestimated almost everything, building features that made perfect sense in my head but instantly confused users. I spent evenings rewriting code because something that worked yesterday inexplicably didn’t work today. And I learned quickly that releasing a beta is less about showcasing what you’ve built and more about confronting all the ways you were wrong.
The only reason Prizology is finally leaving beta now is because users were honest with me. They were generous with their feedback, clear in their critiques and patient while I worked to make the platform better. Every confusing button, every unclear layout, every slow load time — they actually told me. And fixing those issues, one by one, slowly transformed Prizology from an idea into something people could actually rely on.
A More Refined Platform
This release comes with a refreshed look, but the redesign isn’t just aesthetic. It reflects the dozens of small lessons I learned from watching how people actually use the platform. At one point I genuinely believed the interface was already clean and intuitive.
It wasn’t.
Users struggled to find filters, missed deadlines because the layout wasn’t prominent enough and told me straight up when something felt clunky.
So I went back through the entire experience and rebuilt the parts that didn’t hold up. The result is a platform that feels calmer, clearer and much more natural to navigate. The structure is familiar, but it finally looks and behaves like the tool I hoped it would be when I first imagined it.
Rethinking Pricing with the Community in Mind
Pricing was one of the hardest parts of this entire journey. Students told me they needed access but were scared of expensive subscriptions. Doctors wanted a clean, predictable pricing structure. And I worried constantly about striking the balance between sustainability for the platform and fairness for the people using it.
After many conversations, far too many spreadsheets and more hesitation than I'd like to admit, I settled on a simpler pricing system. The Premium plans unlock everything — speciality filters, advanced search and weekly updates.
A Database That Has Outgrown Its Beginnings
It feels surreal to write this, but Prizology now contains more than 500 medical prizes across essays, research awards, audits, funding calls and competitions from universities, royal colleges, journals and medical societies. It started as a tiny spreadsheet with thirty entries. Every week since then, the database has grown, been cleaned, updated, retagged, rewritten and expanded.
Behind that growth is an enormous amount of invisible work: reading guidelines, verifying deadlines, correcting broken links, rewriting summaries for clarity and ensuring eligibility information is accurate. It’s time-consuming and detail-heavy in a way I wasn’t prepared for. But hearing students tell me they found an opportunity they never would have discovered on their own makes every hour worthwhile.
A Growing Team and a Shift in Perspective
For the longest time, I thought I could manage everything myself. Building the platform, maintaining the database, handling support messages and redesigning parts of the UI whenever something broke — I genuinely believed I could juggle it all.
I was wrong.
What changed everything was bringing more people into the mission. This year, a Partnerships Lead joined the team, and their work has already made it possible to onboard more organisations than I could have reached alone. The Ambassador Programme has expanded too, with students from multiple medical schools providing insights, feedback and ideas that I simply never would have thought of myself.
The biggest revelation for me has been recognising that Prizology is no longer just my personal project. It has become a collective effort. It grows because other people believe in it, contribute to it and help steer it in directions I wouldn’t have considered.
Looking Forward
There is still so much more to build. Over the next year, I plan to introduce:
- more speciality filters
- personalised dashboards
- deadline reminders
- improved navigation between multi-stage applications
- tools for societies to manage and track their listings
- deeper links with journals and funding bodies for real-time updates
I also want Prizology to expand beyond the UK into Europe and the Commonwealth, where similar problems exist but solutions remain scattered.
For the first time, these plans feel achievable. Not because the work is any easier, but because the foundation is stronger — the product, the users and the team behind it.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve been part of this journey in any way — whether you reported a bug, sent feedback, shared the platform with a friend or simply trusted Prizology to help you find your next opportunity — thank you. This release reflects your input as much as my effort.
The platform is live, stable and growing, and I hope you’ll continue to shape where it goes next.
If you’d like to explore the full platform, you can create an account.
If you’re an organisation or society interested in sharing your opportunities, you can contact us here whenever you’re ready.