I decided I wanted to go to graduate school because I wanted to make a shift within bioengineering toward designing in and for low resource environments to make health care technology available to everyone. I was encouraged by GMI’s focus on cultural immersion as a means for understanding how to implement a product or process successfully into a community. At Boston Scientific Coyol, although I am not designing for the Costa Rican population specifically, I do get to work with Costa Ricans and learn from them about the country I am living in this summer.
Much of what I have learned here so far, both technically and culturally, has been through the people I work with, who are all friendly and happy to talk about the work they do and their lives outside of the office. Our department eats breakfast and lunch together, unlike in the U.S., where I used to eat my lunch at my desk with my headphones in. I feel comfortable approaching my colleagues because we have developed a rapport beyond our cubicles. At work, since people don’t recognize me as one of their colleagues, they often come up to me and ask about what I’m doing here. They want to know how I’m liking their country and about the work I’m doing at Boston Scientific. When I ask them questions in return, they are happy to talk about what they are working on. I would like to ask some of these friendly coworkers to get coffee with me before I leave so I can ask them more questions about their career paths. They seem excited to host me in their country and I am eager to learn from them.
Hannah and I were able to get our hands dirty doing some testing in the lab this week. For the stent project we are working on, we added corn meal to the original material to see how it would affect the material properties. It acted as we hoped, so we will move forward with a material that has similar properties, but is biocompatible and easier to standardize in production (sorry for the lack of detail here, I’m trying not to breach any confidentiality agreements). It was funny to see a household item like corn meal being used in such a legitimate lab, but since this stent is in the “exploratory” phase of design, proof of concept with inexpensive materials is more effective than using expensive materials that potentially will not work. This reminded me of the low fidelity prototyping we did in the short course, where Dr. Wettergreen encouraged us to use materials like tin foil and pipe cleaners to show how our device would function.
This weekend, we stayed in Escazú and I slept in later than I have in ages. We went on a hike on Saturday and I went to the farmer’s market on Sunday, all in Escazú. I was glad to get to know our own neighborhood a little better and feel more like a local, despite my lack of Spanish skills. I also spent some time in a café going over material for my implementation project. I will be leading TruVent, a way to improve the manual ventilation process in emergency medical settings. I am getting familiar with the need for this project and am excited by the direction it is taking. I am a little overwhelmed by all the catching up I need to do on the work that has already been done, but I hope that speaking with last year’s students, Chandler and Karlee, and continuing to read through the material they provided me with will get me up to speed.
View from our hike in Escazú