Total disclaimer: I was supposed to go to medical school, (sorry mom and dad). Don’t get me wrong, medicine is amazing, and you probably don’t need me to tell you that. We’re in an age where a surgeon can literally print a bladder…then implant it into a living human body!
However, (aye there’s the rub) what if there’s more than one career option that saves lives? At the time of applying to medical school, I began to face what some might call an ‘existential crisis’. I began to question what I was doing and why I was doing it. Was I going to medical school because I genuinely LOVE medicine and want to practice it? Or, was I going to medical school because I was programmed to think that being a doctor was the only option to have a meaningful impact? Either way, committing to becoming a doctor should be based on altruistic and certain motives, and I wasn;t so certain that I had any. I panicked and relied on what I knew.
In my previous medical internships I remember witnessing the amazing things and tools doctors were using to increase the quality of care for patients. Anywhere from medical databases that made the gap between impoverished communities and access to healthcare smaller or high-tech lasers that were able to sculpt and cut a cornea for cataract surgery, technology certainly has an impact on patient care. I always remembered at times being more fascinated at the impact technology had on healthcare as opposed to healthcare itself!
If at all possible, I’d like to learn more about this growing field of the impact that software technology allows us to treat patients with a greater degree of care, whether this be through programming machines to surgeries or solving problems that certain communities face when trying to access healthcare. I’d be honored to learn more about the unexplored domains of software capability and even more interestingly the limitations of software.