UH SASE

“Growing up, I have always had a strong desire to help others. From being a kid who wanted to help friends put their bandaids on, to growing up and volunteering for various organizations. It wasn’t always clear to me why I wanted to help people but I grew to discover being able to help people is what drives me and gives me purpose. This led me to decide that I want to pursue a career in nursing. There are many professions besides healthcare that involve helping people. However, through university experiences and classes I learned medicine and patient care was the way I wanted to do it. I wanted to have a career that is challenging, engaging, and makes an everyday impact on people’s lives and nursing embodies a lot of these characteristics. A nurse’s job can vary from treating illnesses and injuries to also providing patients and families with emotional support. It is rewarding knowing that I can positively impact someone’s life through this occupation. With healthcare, it continues to evolve over time and you will always continue to learn new things, which is something I admire about the occupation. I didn’t always know I wanted to pursue nursing, but after taking various chemistry and biology classes I was able to decide between the different career paths I wanted to take. This influenced my enjoyment for learning about the human body and the microbiology functions behind it. Throughout my prerequisite classes and nursing school classes, I found a new appreciation and admiration for how science has helped us with bettering and saving lives. Although the desire to help others has been the main focus for my career choice, science has been something that has significantly complimented my desire to do so. I hope to continue my journey to becoming a nurse and to one day become a nurse practitioner and continue to discover new things in this profession.”
#SASEScienceWeek2020 and #SASEFutureScientist

I fell in love reading paleontology books as a kid, finding the connection between biology and history. My love for biology and engineering made me decide on doing biomedical engineering, and I was eager to learn more about the applications and fields that some BMEs can do. I remember one Friday during Intro to BME, the genomics and proteomics professor talked about his lab that was focused on finding therapeutic targets to help treat Lupus. He needed undergraduate researchers, so I talked with him after class telling him how my mother has been suffering from Lupus for the last 10 years and that I was eager to know if I can help. After a quick talk about what I knew about the disease he placed me under the post doctorate that was working on antibodies that would be tested on mice with tumors. I worked in his lab for almost 2 years, presented my findings to the Undergraduate Research Fellowship at our school and started focusing on how to make research a career. In the remaining year and a half I had with school, I worked part time in their pathology department and as soon as I graduated, I applied to a research position in the radiation oncology department, and after a month long series of 5 interviews with doctors, physicians, and other clinical staff I was hired on to my current job. I get to work with more people than I expected, and learn coding and medical techniques. My job is more bioinformatics than biomedical engineering, however that’s alright with me. After nearly a year of working with an amazing team, I love talking with the clinical staff, working on their problems like a puzzle, and getting to improve a flawed electronic medical record keeping system.
#SASEScienceWeek2020 #SASEFutureScientist