Today marks the halfway point for my internship with LaCell, and I am happy to report that I am making progress on my learning goals and development as a young professional engineer.
In my first post, I discussed the learning objectives I set for myself to accomplish during my summer internship. I have repeated them below, so curious readers do not have to go back and find my first post.
- Apply my engineering education to a professional, business setting instead of the traditional, academic setting
- Understand how engineering can help solve problems outside of the usual engineering field.
- Expand upon my knowledge of image analysis
- Find ways to balance working on multiple projects
- Exposure to a New Orleans BioInnovation (NOBIC) Company
Whether big or small, I am making progress on all five learning objectives so far. I would say the learning objective I have made the most progress on is “expand upon my knowledge of image analysis.” My primary project is still writing code that quantifies the percentage of a color stain used while culturing cells. Since my last post, my code has significantly improved in efficiency and I am in the process of making the code user-friendly by people (mainly LaCell employees) who do not have backgrounds in programming.
Other than comparing the efficiency and user-friendliness between the different codes I write, I monitor my growth via a composition notebook I write in every day. I begin the day by writing down the goals I need and want to accomplish. After that, I start working and I write EVERYTHING in it. This includes anything from data collection, random thoughts and ideas I have to make my code better, flow charts and (poor) drawings/diagrams to help build my code, and notes from meetings with my supervisor, other members of LaCell, and the Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine.
The composition notebook I religiously write in every day.
My other learning objectives help me build skills that I can transfer to my future career as a biomedical engineer. The ability to use my engineering education to solve problems outside of the engineering field, outside of the traditional, academic setting, and to balance multiple projects at once are valuable assets to any engineer and skills that engineers work on throughout their entire careers. The fact that I get to start developing these skills so early on will give me a leg up in my career that many engineers will not have immediately after graduation.
I chose the quote “the scientist describes what is, the engineer creates what never was” by Theodore von Karman (a famous mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist) as the title of this post because I think it describes the field of biomedical engineering, as well as the essence of my internship. Since the field of biomedical engineering is relatively new, students who study it are exposed to both scientific/medical subjects and engineering subjects. Biomedical engineers provide a bridge between the pure scientists and pure engineers. This new connection between the two subjects is solving problems in medicine and medical technology at an incredibly fast rate. At LaCell, I provide a connection between them, the scientists at heart, and the engineering world to solve problems that otherwise might go unsolved or take longer to solve. To be involved in this new, rapidly growing field and to be a woman in this field, is breaking gender standards in the medical and engineering fields. I am incredibly grateful to be part of that change.