About Me

My Academic Career and Motivation

I am a sophomore in the Biomedical Engineering course. I am also going to obtain a minor in mathematics and fulfill the requirements for pre-med in the next two years.

I chose biomedical engineering because of my dad. My dad works in medicine but has a fascination with engineering in many forms so growing up there was always some project going on. I remember watching him work on a seismometer in our basement for hours on end because he showed me the data it could gather and match it to events recorded on the news. Things like earthquakes all the way in the Philippines would be detected from our basement. This combined with talking to him gradually led to me blending engineering and medicine in my head, and now I want to work with both simultaneously.

Qualities of a Good Team Member

I think that a good team member can be identified by a few core skills. The first and most important in my mind is communication, all the other skills in the world make no difference at all if you cannot even form a team. Following this is adaptability, while working on a team for projects, it is pretty common in my experience that most of the members have relatively the same experience/skill set, so it is important to be able to fill in those positions on a project that maybe are not your specialty, but within your ability. Finally, I would say the last massively important quality to have is agency. This might sound odd at first, but to me, being a good team member is about making the other members better as well. Agency is a useful tool when combined with communication to keep a team moving and motivated, and if a team is well motivated, the work becomes less onerous and even enjoyable. These are just a handful of qualities that go into being a good team member, but they tie into many other skills.

I think I have all of these qualities to an extent. I understand that if I'm in a team of four members and all of us are engineering backgrounds. Then when we are typing up a report or preparing a presentation, we need someone who is willing to reach into their writing or speech skills. I am always willing to be that someone because I think the team being cohesive is more important than each person playing to their biggest strength.

How I will Improve

The core quality I want to work on is agency. I tend towards wanting to set out specific goals for each team member, fulfill them as independently as possible and fill in together at the end, but I know that my method is not the most effective way to work as a team.

Personal Example

I utilized agency and my motivational skills in a relatively minor way in a Physics Lab. In October, at the end of a tenuous two hour lab to gather data, our lab group's computer crashed and we lost everything. The will to redo the entire lab was almost nonexistent, but through encouragement that it would be easier the second time around, a handful of jokes, leading by example, and gentle prodding, I was able to get the entire group back up and running so we could still finish in time. The result was a finished lab and a saved grade for the semester. It was a situation where my group wanted to give up and take the zero on an important project, but determination and encouragement brought us back together.

Growth as a professional

Being in an environment like the Innovations Lab has helped me realize how much I want my future work environments to be like that one. I noticed a lot of instant camaraderie between people who had never met before while still maintaining professional conduct. I want to be like that in the future because I think the ability to mesh instantly with any coworkers is an incredibly valuable skill set, especially considering that I want to work in healthcare where you meet new people every day. I really aspire to be someone who is comfortable and effective in any environment.

As someone who is relatively new to the professional world, my first years interacting are all about growing into it. The way a professional environment works is almost completely opposite from my academic experience so I have had to almost completely reverse how I conduct myself. Every day is a chance for improvement , and I strive to better myself. Over the year I grew into being the utility role in my internship, where I had my own projects, but I helped with many of the nitty gritty things that have to be done but are time consuming for the more experienced members. My position over the year became much more self-project oriented over the beginning where I needed to learn and get a handle on how the lab operates which helped me grow as a professional.