Before her debut album hit No. 1 in the U.K., and before she started penning tracks with the likes of Alicia Keys and playing to North American arenas with Coldplay, Emeli Sand would enter talent competitions at the medical school where she studied in Glasgow.

Everyone else came out, she recalls. There were breakdancers all med students have a hidden talent. Everyone played something. In my third year, they said, We would prefer if you didnt come back.

Her erstwhile competitors could see that with her sweet and boomingly soulful voice, she was in a different league and yet for years, record labels turned her down. They just didnt see it, she says. They could hear the songs were good, but I dont know that they understood: Theres this med student. Shes not from the BRIT School [a performing-arts academy in London whose alumni include Adele and Amy Winehouse]. Her success, in the end, wasnt your normal pop star story, but hopefully it made [labels] see that if you want something to stick, you have to do something different.

On the morning after an opening set for Coldplay at Torontos Air Canada Centre, Sand smiles as she lounges on a leather couch in the screening room of a Yorkville hotel so posh it has carports at the front and rear to accommodate decoy celebrity vehicles. Her dyed-blond hair done up in a sideways-apostrophe quiff, she wears her glamour with a touch of funkiness, and she hardly comes across as entitled. She speaks in a soft Scots burr about being grateful for every opportunity shes been given thus far, including singing at the Olympics Opening Ceremony, with a rumoured slot in the Closing Ceremony on Aug. 12 as well (her lips are sealed as to specifics, but she allows that being selected means the world to her).

On this continent, she remains much of an unknown quantity: Onstage before Coldplay, she sang as people were still filing into the venue. Her short and winsome set mixed her pop, gospel, R&B and dance-music leanings and seemed to win her some new fans. You just have to come completely unassuming and start afresh, she says.

Sand is the daughter of a Zambian father and a Cumbrian mother, who met in the 80s as students in Sunderland, in northeast England. There, she says, they got a lot of abuse for being together, and [with] their families it was quite difficult as well. I guess thats made me very strong in who I am, knowing what theyve struggled through just because they felt it was right.

The family moved to tiny Alford, in Aberdeenshire, where her father started teaching and directing a secondary school choir. When she was a child, he introduced her to the likes of Anita Baker and Cline Dion all these massive vocalists and her habit of wandering around the house belting out Mariah Carey tunes convinced her parents she had talent. But even though she signed a publishing deal to write songs at age 16, she also had a passion for science; she enrolled in medical school, aiming to be either a psychiatrist or a neurologist. I really was a geek, she says. It was exciting for me! As she studied, her relatives would send recordings of her singing to people in radio and TV. She landed a gig singing a hook on a hit single by rapper Chipmunk, but the video was shot on a day when was writing an exam; unperturbed, the label hired an actress to mime her part.

Sand started shopping herself around to record companies a process so frustrating that it inspired her to write the song Clown, with lyrics about performing for unappreciative people. Labels responses were sadly predictable: Everybody said, Thats a great song for this person and this person, but they didnt want to sign me.

Finally another guest spot with grime artist Wylie convinced Virgin Records to take her on. Having completed a neuroscience B.Sc. (but not the full med-school training), she abandoned her studies and moved to London, taking with her the discipline she had learned from counting cells in microscopes, and an interest in how music affects the brain. As she worked on her own album, she began writing songs for big names such as rapper Tinie Tempah and X Factor superstar Susan Boyle, always aiming to stretch singers out of their comfort zones.

It made me realize that I must keep doing things that are a surprise to me

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Emeli Sandé’s long journey from med school to the Opening Ceremonies