All I can say is it’s been a whirlwind, or rather a hurricane. Although difficult to believe, almost a month has passed since the beginning of the fall semester on August 21st. Honestly, I’ve lost track of the days, as it’s been so hectic between GMI and natural disasters, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Let’s start from the beginning. The first week of classes was definitely a shock to the system. Since I was abroad all summer, I was unfortunately unable to join my classmates in Costa Rica for the internship and design short courses. (I’ll be completing my internship throughout the fall and spring semesters.) Although I found my fellow GMI colleagues nothing but welcoming, friendly, and enthusiastic, it did not take away the learning curve to catch up on what I had missed. Concepts such as PDT analysis, needs clusters, and stakeholder analysis were being thrown out there casually and I was a bit overwhelmed. I’m happy to say by this point I’ve figured it all out (I hope). It did help that I had some extra time what with Hurricane Harvey, which leads me to the second week of the semester.
Despite this being my fifth year now in Houston, I had yet to experience any major hurricane season, until now. I am fortunate to say that my apartment and car are both intact. The worst I experienced was going stir crazy from staying inside for four days straight. It did give me time to catch up on some reading though. Because the biodesign textbook I ordered from Amazon was delayed in the mail due to Harvey, I ended up renting the Kindle version and downloading the Kindle app to my laptop. Not ideal, but it worked out and my book eventually came in over a week later.
As a result of the flooding, Rice was closed for the entire second week of classes and Houston is still a mess, even weeks post-Harvey. It’s going to be a long recovery process. But GMI and life do not stop, not even for Harvey. While stuck inside I was also busy finalizing my internship plans. I am happy to announce that I am working as an R&D intern at LivaNova this semester in the neuromodulation sector. I’ve just begun my internship and am excited to learn and contribute to the company.
These past two weeks the semester has swooped back in full force. Mondays and Wednesdays I’m at my internship. Tuesdays and Thursdays are dedicated to classes and meetings. Fridays usually fill up too. What are all these classes and meetings you may ask? Well, I have a statistics course and an industry lecture series but my two main courses are project based: a medical technology implementation course and the healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship course.
For the implementation course, we are each given a project in more of the back end of the design process. For my project, I am working with Siri on DialOasis, yes the DialOasis from last year’s GMI cohort and the one you read about in the blog posts from this summer. Therefore, I won’t bore you with too much detail. In short, we are designing a “portable clean room” so that patients in Costa Rica can perform peritoneal dialysis at home. It’s kind of funny that Siri and I, the two who were not in Costa Rica this summer and therefore the only ones not familiar with the project yet, ended up on the DialOasis team. It’s a great project though and the community in Costa Rica is really excited about getting it up and running and into clinical trials. We’ll be visiting Costa Rica at the end of the month to gain more insight into the status of the project which I’m looking forward to.
The second project I have going on this semester is for healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship, a collaboration between doctors in the medical center, MBA students, and us in the GMI program. The project I am working on focuses on a way to improve basic life support and emergency response following cardiac arrest. Designing a solution to solve this problem is turning out to be more complicated than I initially expected. However, I am on a team with knowledgeable, hard-working people and am sure we will come up with a creative solution.
Like I said, it’s been a hurricane of a month. It’s challenged me but also invigorated me. I’m ready to stretch my knowledge and capabilities as I delve deeper into real-world problems and the design process. Despite the amount of work, my fellow GMI colleagues and I always find time for a laugh and some fun. I’m looking forward to the next eight months and what GMI has in store. I couldn’t have asked for better classmates or a better program. Until next time…