In February 2024, I hosted the data science competition, BioMed Datathon, as part of BUET's Biomedical Engineering Department's annual festival. 23 teams across the country participated in the online round on Kaggle, making more than 350 submissions, and 12 qualified for the stage round at BUET.  This event was co-hosted by Tasmia Rahman Aanika, Mahmud Wasif Nafee, and Asfina Hassan Juicy, all my friends from the same batch. From the Kaggle competition setup and data organization to hosting the stage round, I gained a memorable experience. As a first-time organizer of such a large-scale competition, I faced many challenges, among which organizing the dataset provided by the department for the competition was the most crucial. It helped later with my ColpoSense dataset curation work for my thesis and made me realize how vital dataset usability is for developing impactful medical AI solutions. 

Follow the private competition invitation link to view the competition on Kaggle.

BUET BMES Student Chapter is the first student branch of the Biomedical Engineering Society in the Asia-Pacific region, which started its journey in October 2021. I joined the communication executive team in December 2021, briefly after joining the student chapter. In the first six months, my task was maintaining the chapter's email communication. After success in the assigned member recruitment and new member management task, I was promoted to Communication Chair in the first Annual General Meeting in June 2022. During my one year as the head of the communications team, I managed a group of executives assigned to all formal and informal communication of the chapter, social media engagement, recruitment of members, and campus ambassadors. Following success in the communication sector, I secured the General Secretary position in June 2023, where my duty was planning and ensuring the execution of all the chapter activities. Through my journey with the BUET BMES Student Chapter, I have evolved. I learned to evaluate activities from a professional viewpoint and gained first-hand experience in management.  It also helped me with my communication skills, leadership abilities, motivational efforts, and presentation skills, which are expected to be helpful in my future commitments. I have been directly involved in the following events in my time at the chapter -

• Breaking The Silence: An annual awareness event for breast, cervical, and prostate cancer funded by relatives of cancer victims. We invite specialists to promote awareness among people who naturally tend to hide their medical conditions and bear some stereotypical ideas about the mentioned cancer types. We also invite cancer survivor to share their inspirational stories.

• The Wise Words: A series of seminars on different research topics in biomedical engineering, both in-person and virtual. We invite speakers from various research backgrounds and diverse groups.

• The Nerd Talk: We invite our alumni who went on to pursue careers in academia to this group discussion session.

• Mental Health Awareness: Guiding session for BUET BMES Student Chapter members on stress management and dealing with mental health conditions. 

• School Outreach: We visit junior schools to introduce the field of biomedical engineering to STEM students across the city through interactive talks, fun presentations, and projects. 

• Biomedical Olympiad and Lab Tours: We recently designed this new event to further engage with upcoming undergraduate students.

• Bioluminescence Magazine: This is the chapter magazine we launched last year. It features our activities, the department's research endeavors, faculty insights, interviews of the pioneers of BUET Biomedical Engineering, and fiction/nonfiction articles from a writing contest. I was one of the supervisors of this project.

Visit us on Facebook to learn more about our activities. I left the chapter this September and handed over the committee to the promoted executives as I graduated from the university. The student chapter and its activities were an influential part of my undergraduate life, shaping me as a valuable team player, which would help me to be a useful part of any research lab in the future.