Blood Drawn
Hi everyone!
So this morning I had to wake up early and go to Student Health to get blood drawn. I hate getting my blood drawn. This really got me thinking about what I plan on doing with my BME degree upon graduation. In this post I am going to analyze my thoughts on the 3 typical paths a BME student takes upon graduation.
Let’s start with why I needed my blood drawn. So this summer I will be doing an REU at Wake Forest University at the Center for Injury Biomechanics. They sent me a form to fill out with all of these required tests, and naturally I needed more tests to be performed because that’s just how life works. However, these forms have really gotten me excited for the summer and the opportunity to expand my research experience and see additional labs that relate to BME. In my time at UVA, I have been involved in the Cardiac Biomechanics Group. I have been focusing on image analysis of rats that have been subjected to heart attacks. This work has really gotten me excited about research, however, I am searching for more of an experiment-focused research. At the same time, though, I am not a huge fan of “wet-lab.” I feel like everything always goes wrong with the experiment, which makes it difficult for me to develop strong opinions on the data analysis. Overall, though, I really like the real-world implications of research and the idea of making progressions to medicine. For this reason, I am extremely intrigued by the graduate school path and the idea of pursuing a PhD in BME.
On the other hand, I currently work as a server at a Sports Bar, which has introduced me to a fast pace work environment. Since I have seen every episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I was under the impression that being a physician is the fastest pace occupation that relates to healthcare. Granted it may be faster paced than research, this show definitely gives a skewed perception of what being a physician is actually like. After shadowing, I have seen that many specialties also have shifts that move very slow. Not every day is an action packed, dramatic story. The real benefit to being a physician, in my opinion, is being able to see the direct impact that your hard work has on others. In research, it could be years before you make a significant breakthrough. As a physician, I feel like you can see yourself helping someone every day. For this reason, I have definitely thought about taking some time off after college to prepare for medical school.
The last major BME path I can think of is industry–namely consulting. I don’t think consulting would be a good fit for me because I really hate how so many things in society are influenced by business decisions. Although I’m sure the PhD and Physician tracks would have significant business components to them (i.e. red-tape from universities or hospitals in regards to funding), they’re not nearly as economically-focused as consulting would be. I’m sure consultants get to work on some awesome projects, but I don’t think I would want to work somewhere where my job was about making decisions based off of what is cost-effectiveness, compared to what would help the most people. I don’t know, I just really don’t like business stuff.
So, the blood drawing really got me thinking. What is my current status and how does this relate to this course? Well, I think I really want to go into academia. Like I said earlier, I want to control the future of medicine, not just utilize a wide-range of (very important) knowledge to implement the plethora of current practices. In research, I feel like you get to be creative and take chances. There are so many opportunities to change experiments in order to gather new data and make new conclusions. I am still so new to the field of BME, but I feel like more time would really allow me to see the importance of this field and develop my passions. Well that’s all I have for now!
-Alex
BME Design 