On June 3rd I began a new chapter of my life as it was the first day of the Rice GMI master program I was going to be devoting the next year to. Now it is week 2 and I can say that while I am still adjusting there have been so many things that have surpassed my expectations for the program. This blog post will be the first one of a series that I will post during my time in Costa Rica and at Rice to share my experiences tackling unmet health needs on a global scale. I am both incredibly nervous and excited to start my career as an “official” bioengineer and begin taking on the medical challenges that plague the healthcare industry.
Today is Sunday, and tomorrow I begin my first official day at the Medical company Hologic which is where I will be interning for the rest of the summer. Up until now, me and my fellow classmates have been working nonstop for the past two weeks in a boot camp like environment at Intel’s Innovation Centre in San José. It has been a challenge but I have learned more from the past two weeks then an entire year of senior design. During the first week of the boot camp, the GMI students mixed with Costa Rican students from various universities with the goal of the course being to understand the innovation process associated with finding and developing a solution to an unmet health challenge. My group included me and my fellow GMI classmate Lamiya, along with 4 other Costa Rican students as we tied to tackle the challenge of redesigning the speculum used to access the vaginal canal during pelvic exams. The current speculum design is outdated and very uncomfortable for the patient receiving the exam, and so this provided a good target market for us to research and come up with ideas as to how we could make the exam easier and more comfortable for the patient. During the 4 days of the course my team spent countless hours in the classroom and out performing background research, brainstorming possible solutions, and prototyping. I know the knowledge and experience I gained in such a short amount of time will be invaluable as I begin my two year-long projects later in the school year.
The second week of boot camp began with a lecture from Paul Fearis who explained the importance of clinical observations and putting yourself in the shoes of the healthcare providers you are designing devices for. I never understood the process of finding needs until now as I always started with a problem already fleshed out and so it was very insightful to learn about the first half of the innovation process. On Wednesday, I got to go to one of Costa Rica’s national hospitals, Hospital México, to conduct clinical observations in the oncology department. I got to scrub in on a tumorectomy surgery, and watch a surgeon remove a malignant tumor and lymph nodes from a woman’s breast. It was incredibly difficult to take notes every moment during the surgery, but the next day I used the detailed notes I took to make mind maps which really helped me figure out where there were problems that could be addressed during the procedure. Starting, this week I will be conducting clinical observations similar to the one I just described every Friday.
While the first two-weeks in San José have been a race to cram as much design experience and clinical observation skills as possible into such a short amount of time, there has also been a more adventurous side to the program. After the first week, everyone in the program got to bond on a weekend retreat to Manuel Antonio – one of the most famous beaches in Costa Rica! The trip was amazing as we got to experience both the beautiful beaches and the rain forests of Costa Rica. In true tourist fashion, me and another student in the program went parasailing and surfing at the beach. This most recent weekend, me and few of the other students traveled to La Fortuna to explore Arenal national park and the famous Baldi hot springs. Some of the best food I have had so far in Costa Rica has been at very small family run restaurants called Sodas, which are common in the smaller towns of Costa Rica but hard to find in the more commercialized San José. Besides the food, one of the best things so far about the program s how wonderful the other GMI students are. On the first day, I was worried that my personality might clash with the different personalities of my fellow GMI students, but after struggling through the two-week long intensive boot camp and going on two weekend excursions together, I can say that I am excited to learn and grow with them during this program.