Where to begin? How about not with DialOasis? While a lot of my time is spent on my implementation project, there is so much other stuff going on with the GMI program and my life. So instead of focusing on DialOasis like my last two blog posts, how about let’s talk about everything else, ok? Let’s go!

SWE Conference

The biggest event of my October was the annual Society of Women Engineers (SWE) conference which was held in Austin this year. This conference is the largest conference and career fair for women in the world. I think I heard there were somewhere north of 13,000 people in attendance, everyone from college students searching for jobs to lifelong SWE members and professionals. The conference was an amazing opportunity to network, talk to recruiters, and meet fellow women engineers. The highlight of SWE for me was talking to members of all the big MedTech companies at the career fair. I spent all of Friday at the fair and although I was nervous at first as I am not one for formal interviews, I had a lot of fun. I enjoyed practicing “selling myself” and learning about all the various companies. In attendance were almost all the big MedTech companies from J&J and Medtronic to Baxter, Stryker, and more.

GMI Cohort at SWE

Activated Project

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but I am sure Chandler has, I am also working on a project called Activated. This is a class project where we are essentially going through the steps of the innovation and startup process. The projects are a collaboration between us GMI students, MBA students, and physicians in the medical center. Chandler and a few other MBA students comprise my team. Physicians brought us unmet needs (one of those buzz words) and our team was tasked with improving the care of patients who experience cardiac arrest outside of the hospital. Since the beginning of the semester, our team has talked with a number of physicians, EMTs, and administrators in emergency services. From talks with them and our own research, we realized that our original need was not the real need at all. As a result, our project has morphed from cardiac arrest to a way to fix the 911 system as a whole, helping identify non-urgent calls so unnecessary ambulances are not dispatched.

The project has definitely stretched me to think in new ways that I didn’t get in my undergraduate education. Continual needs refining, collaborating with physicians, and learning the business side of things—it’s a lot of practical, hands on experiences. I knew going into GMI that it would be heavily project and real-world based, but I didn’t realize just how much.

Needs Finding

Along the lines of collaborating with physicians and refining needs, another aspect of GMI is that we get to do needs finding (as I referenced above). Needs finding is basically a fancy word meaning we get to go out and observe clinicians in the field, determining where improvements can be made because where there are shortcomings or “needs” there are often solutions (e.g. medical devices). This past month I had the opportunity to view surgeries at Texas Children’s Hospital as well as go on ambulance rides with EMS. These experiences are eye opening because I get to see all the crossover with what I am learning. The ambulance rides, in particular, were insightful for my Activated project mentioned above. It was reassuring to verify that the need we finally settled on for Activated was actually a relevant, prevalent unmet need for EMTs.

Internship

One last section, I promise. My internship. This semester I am interning at a medical device company in Houston. This is where everything comes together. I’m getting to apply what I am learning in my classes at an actual company. It’s so exciting and exactly what makes the GMI program so exceptional. I’ll learn something in class and a few days later, that topic will come up at work and I won’t have to just sit there clueless. I’ll know what’s going on and can actively contribute. For example, needs finding, CPT codes (which have to do with medical billing and coding), FDA approval, and clinical trials– all of these topics have come up at my internship. It’s exciting when I am able to put into practice what I have learned. It’s all about connecting the dots and tying the knot.