February has been full of sprints, design projects, keeping up with 2 course electives (Medical Human Factors, Strategic Problem Solving), and job interviewing.
Sprints are great- you get to help other people work on their projects when your personal project is held up by snags. For example, one week I had to wait on a REDCap problem to be solved by the Barretos Cancer Hospital IT department. This was going to take some time, so I shelved my project for a week and helped Josh with his implementation project (designing a phone lens attachment to produce higher quality photos of skin lesions). This helps Josh get more done, and I’m still being a productive member of GMI. When it’s my turn to run the sprint that week, I can count on other people to help me get even more things done than if I were on my own. Running sprints also gives you a chance to embrace a managerial role and delegate tasks (something easier said than done!).
My design team had to pivot our project this month. Thankfully we didn’t exhaust too many resources, time, and emotion before we realized multiple competitive solutions existed on the market. It turns out several companies have pounced on the opportunity to effectively screen for premature retinopathy. After devoting about 5 minutes of mourning to our lost efforts, we quickly refocused our attention on finding a new problem. Luckily, last semester’s Needs Finding gave us about 30 viable filtered needs to potentially pursue. Our team quickly focused our attention on 4 of these problems, and began to blitz. Blitzing is when you do a background search, scope the problem, find key stakeholders and connections, map out the market size, and define the patent and competitor landscape in a span of 3 days. The end result is a clear(er) view of which problem we should pursue. The rest of the semester will be spent validating our new problem and brainstorming solutions, once we meet with Dr. Richardson tomorrow and decide which problem to pick!
It was my 23rd birthday on Valentine’s Day last week, and as I blew out the two candles on my birthday cupcake surrounded by dear friends I wished for one thing… employment. AND IT CAME TRUE! I certainly wouldn’t have made it through the application process if it weren’t for the GMI program and the international industry/clinical experience it gave me. Cheers to one big box checked off on my list!