Hola, hello, howdy, or however else you may say it – hi! I’m Alex and this summer I’m very fortunate to be a part of the Summer 2025 Global Medical Innovation (GMI) cohort in Costa Rica.
Before we dive into what this summer will hold, I want to let y’all get to know me. I’m from Atlanta, GA, and a recent graduate from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Spanish. I played piccolo in the Marching Band and was a sister in Tau Beta Sigma, a music service sorority. In my spare time, you’ll find me reading, sewing, or listen to music or podcasts.
This summer, I’ll be participating in the Needs Finding and Medical Innovation Bootcamps that kickoff Monday, before transitioning to working at La Hospital Nacional de los Niños.
Going into this summer, I’m bringing a strong background in design, and Spanish. My GT courses have given me a lot of experience in the design process and how to rapidly prototype, which will be helpful since this is a very quick program. Many of the classes were built on group projects that focused on finding and addressing a current unmet clinical need, which is the basis of this program. Additionally, I’ve been taking higher level Spanish classes since high school so I feel confident in my ability to communicate. While some of this program is conducted in English, we are working in a Spanish speaking country. It’s important to be able to communicate with patients in order to fully address their needs and learn from them.
On top of this, I hope to develop new skills from this program, specifically how to work in a clinical setting, how to communicate the same information to different user groups, and some new Spanish vocabulary. While I have a background in Spanish, I’m hoping that the summer will help me specialize with different medical terminology and be able to use it accurately. Next, working in a children’s hospital is a unique setting for needs finding as the patients (children), their support system (parents, guardians, etc.), and their care team (nurses, doctors, technicians, etc.) are all different demographics with different connections to what the patient is dealing with. This means that one needs to be careful with how they phrase things or ask questions because a child’s answer is going to be different than a specialist. As such, I want to get better at not just asking the questions, but in taking everyone’s answers and standardizing them to engineering terms that can be used in a design. Lastly, I want to understand how to work in a clinical setting. This is something I haven’t done before and am excited to learn how it works from a “behind the scenes” perspective. As a Bioengineering Master’s student, I am going to be making devices to work in this space, so why wouldn’t I want to know all of the ins and outs to make designs that will be effective?
As I look ahead to the rest of the summer, I hope that I can look back on this summer as a time of growth and adventure, both professionally and personally. I hope that I’ll have gained a better understanding of how clinical settings work and feel more confident working in them. I hope that this understanding will guide my ability to design medical devices once back in Houston, since I’m coming from an engineering heavy background. I’m also hoping that I’ll feel more confident working in new environments and more adaptable to them. Lastly, I’m hoping to have met some incredible people and had some fun adventures that will be memories I’m sure to treasure.
Here’s to all the adventures that this summer will bring and I hope you’ll follow along with me via this blog! 😁