Looking Back
This past semester has definitely been a busy one, but it has also been very rewarding. Between all of the required BME courses and electives I took, I think that this semester has been the most challenging, but its also the first time I truly felt like I have been learning material that is extremely applicable to my future in all of my classes. First year was filled with the Gen-Ed’s of the E-School and second year seemed like the Gen-Ed’s of BME. Now, I feel like everything I have learned is going to be extremely relevant to my future.
This design course has really helped me gauge a better understanding of what I want to do with my life. Although the clinical exposure is what really motivated me to take this course, the clinical experiences were totally not what I expected. I thought these visits to the hospital would inspire me to want to become a physician or some type of health care provider. But looking back, this definitely is not the case. I really enjoyed these visits, but I now know that this is not the path I want to take.
The reason I don’t want to work entirely in a hospital setting is because I don’t like to see other people stressed out. I really don’t care if I’m stressed out, but on multiple visits I saw so many people patiently waiting in the PICU for their loved ones to get better. It really takes a special type of person to be able to handle this type of environment on a daily basis. I think that I may enjoy being an engineer who specializes in clinical settings. Something that I have talked about in other posts is that this course was the first time that I got a glimpse of what I imagined biomedical engineering to be like. I thought that I would constantly be working with people in the hospital in order to find solutions to medical problems. Therefore, I found it very surprising when I realized that a lot of BME research is computational.
Overall, I think that I want to do research that has a very clinically-oriented focus. Although I’m not sure exactly what research I want to specialize in, I know that I want to work closely with physicians to solve problems. I would prefer to work on more biology-physiology focused projects than device design, but I think the clinical exposure is essential to biomedical engineering. I feel like seeing these problems consistently arise in the hospital is even motivation to work harder and speed up the process of finding solutions. The last major take-away I have from this course is that you have to be confident, and even kind of risky when you are making decisions about any type of designs. I realize that (as long as nobody is at risk) the best designs are ones where you’re not afraid to fail. By not being afraid to take chances, and be willing to go against the norm, I think great solutions can arise in this field.
BME Design 