Dearest readers,
Thank you all for following along with my blog posts throughout the entire summer. Today, the Costa Rica Hospital de Niños team is officially done with our final presentations! Ultimately, I was able to come up with a solution that improves on an existing commercial device by providing an additional degree of freedom to manipulate the Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound transducer positioning with precision and stability. This summer, not only did I have the opportunity to shadow and conduct clinical needs finding firsthand at a Costa Rica children’s hospital, I also learned how to use CAD, created my first CAD drawing independently, and 3D printed my first pieces! Dr. Bogantes was the sweetest and most helpful mentor anyone can have in this experience, and his affirmation after my final presentation made the whole experience very rewarding.
To wrap things up in Costa Rica, Rei, Alex, Connor, and I made a list of food and activities that we have to try at least one more time before we leave. This included more chicken, rice and beans, watching the F1 movie (again) while enjoying the sweet popcorn, visiting the local LEGO store (where everything is twice the price of the same products in the US), and most importantly, getting food and catch up one last time with our Tico friends. I am very glad that we got to meet and befriend so many local students here in our first weeks. This truly changed our time and experience here. We had much more in depth tours of the different parts of Costa Rica and really got to experience and understand the Pura Vida lifestyle and Costa Rican culture. While I am excited to return to the familiarity of the US, Costa Rica will forever have a place in my heart that I will miss dearly.
