June Update

Being a college graduate feels more and more surreal every day. There are days where it does not feel true and there are days where I am so glad that I finished. Though I have a lot of school left ahead of me, it is a very bittersweet feeling to know that I will never sit in those classrooms again, live in a college dorm again, or rush to class through all of the shortcuts I have learned over the past four years. Most importantly, it is a strange experience to never again be able to say that I am creating my own major. I already did it and it is a chapter of my life that is now complete.

In order to reflect on my entire college experience as a whole, I need to look back at the plans I made for myself when entering the custom-designed major program. I remember the day we started to create our learning goals so clearly in our Custom Design 102 class. I can vividly imagine myself sitting there with a blank sheet of paper wracking my brain for everything I wanted out of my major. I knew in my head that there were so many things I wanted, but I could not find the words to articulate them for so long. Eventually, I did a lot of research and pieced a bunch of words together that I thought would be important for my major.

For our first poster presentation where we presented our majors to the world, I used those learning goals that honestly seemed kind of exaggerated but sounded pretty good on paper as the ideal goals I wanted to achieve.

First and foremost, I wanted to learn how to better integrate healthcare technologies into healthcare sectors of underserved areas.

Secondly, I wanted to understand the current limitations present in a variety of different healthcare systems.

Three, I wanted to address the technical, political, and cultural barriers to successful implementation of medical technology.

Finally, I wanted to put this major to practical use by designing and implementing solutions to the existing global health challenges I would learn about.

During that poster presentation, I remember so many people telling me that they saw such a need for my major and that I seemed uber passionate about the topic. At that point, I knew that I had chosen the right field because I had endless possibilities through the Custom-Designed Major program and out of everything in the world, I chose to study global health technologies.

Reflecting back on these learning goals today, I see that my senior capstone was an all inclusive culmination of these goals, something I never imagined beyond my wildest dreams. I learned how to integrate healthcare technologies into a variety of healthcare sectors through my entrepreneur’s toolkit. I did this by understanding the current limitations of healthcare systems through addressing the political and cultural barriers to successful implementation. Though technical barriers were not as large as I had initially dreamed of, I attribute the change to my capstone a reflection of the learning process that I have had throughout my four years. Finally, I could not think of a better way to put this major to practical use by designing and implementing some of the solutions I found if I tried. An entrepreneur’s toolkit is absolutely perfect to achieve these goals and I am so proud of how the final product turned out.

As another point of reflection, I looked back at my first mission statement that I created as I joined the major. Today, my major looks pretty different than the one I entered the program with, but I can also clearly tell that when I first created the major of Nanotechnology in Medicine, I was never going to be as passionate about it as I would about my current major. At the time, I did not appreciate the flexibility that the program gave me but looking back, I realize that I left no page unturned. I went through nearly every iteration of a major that I wanted to and came to the conclusion on my own that I needed to create a major that I would be so passionate talking about all the time.

Through my senior capstone presentation, that is exactly the feedback I heard. A lot of my family came to my presentation and they said that they had never seen me so passionate about something as much as I was about my major and my capstone project and the Kanya Project. I think that really is the best feedback I could have received because it showed me that other people saw value in the major I had created and the things I had accomplished through it.

I really enjoyed being able to present my work to other people because it really solidified that the work I have been doing for the past year actually meant something and that people could see a value in this work. At this point, it became so much more than just a concept I was working on for months to build out and has now become an actual, tangible document that I can distribute and use to help people grow their business. One of the biggest things I learned through my capstone journey is that I really want to help people help the world rather than just do everything myself. This is a very dramatic shift in mindset than the one I came into college with where I thought that whatever needed to be done I have to do myself.

Through this project and the creation of the toolkit, I learned that I do not need to be on the frontlines of every project or action I take on, and that has fundamentally changed me for the better. I now see that the power of giving and receiving help is so strong and that you can reach monumental heights by working with a team. I also learned that I will not be passionate about everything but that does not mean I should never try or use my knowledge and now expertise with this toolkit to help others. There are some projects I know this toolkit can really help but I have no strong desire to be in them myself, and that is fine. I never realized the power I had until I learned how to say “no” to things and it has given me so much more control. I honestly think this is why I am so proud of the culmination of my senior capstone project because it is “my project”. Of course I had an infinite amount of help along the journey of creating this toolkit, but the content and format and learning lessons were dictated by only myself. That is a kind of ownership that I have never been able to have over my work before for projects this large and I am so glad that I can finish off my major in such a bright light.

I have also reflected on my major and academic coursework as I had these realizations and one thing that I found quite surprising about the early stages of my major compared to today is that I never thought business would play such a big role in my college career. I initially had healthcare administration as a large part of my major in my plan of study and as one of my main disciplines. However, I only took 3 or 4 classes in that section. Instead, I switched out this portion of my major with a business minor in technology innovation management which I believe was a great decision!

Through this minor, I focused “broadly on understanding the process of innovation and management approaches to innovation with a special emphasis on technology change as a source of innovations.” I think this minor was a crucial part of my major and capstone because it really gave me the technology piece of my major, a crucial third of global health technology. Through this course selection, I was able to learn and put together key ideas of how different innovation can be in the technology sector and how those innovations are constantly changing. These lessons complimented my major really well too because I learned how important it is to stay up to date and relevant, especially in a field that can change so quickly, seemingly overnight.

For me, the connections I drew from this minor and the other disciplines I had chosen in my field were really natural. I could clearly define the barriers that one would face in startups because we read over forty case studies about how many barriers everyone else faced and it gave me a deeper appreciation of how difficult it is to become successful. I think that is the reason I found it so important to include case studies, as well as my own case study in my final entrepreneur’s toolkit. The way I learned these lessons was by seeing others go through them in case studies.

I also found it important to add a public health minor to give me the global health aspect of my major, global health technologies. I think I knew from my first month at Drexel that I wanted to take some public health classes. I had always been interested in the subject and I thought it was important for me as a future medical professional to understand. This really gave me the background of having an all encompassing view on healthcare and the barriers that people in the healthcare system face.

I only ended up taking one social entrepreneurship class, but I found it to be a key part of my education and one of the core components of my capstone. My senior capstone advisor, Dr. Ozlem Ogutveren-Gonul, was actually my teacher during this class and her class and eventual guidance played a large role in the creation of my capstone. I found that though my toolkit is more broadly for all entrepreneurs, I specifically was very interested in the idea of social entrepreneurship as a way to create self-sustaining business models while creating change in a local community.

I think the only weakness of this major is that we do not have many opportunities to get to know one another. I think being in a position where I could create my own major and really personalize college to exactly what I wanted it to be was such an amazing experience. However, I never really had a chance to meet the people that were graduating alongside me this term which I really would have appreciated. I think it can get very isolating when people in more traditional majors take all of their classes together and get very close because of it. We do not have the same experience because we are constantly being introduced to new topics and disciplines so it would be nice to meet the other people in our major a bit more so we have the same sort of camaraderie that other majors and disciplines have, even if we are not all in the same classes.

Outside of classes and my major, I have had a lot of extracurricular and co-curricular activities that I loved being a part of. First and foremost, I have to mention RESULTS and being a volunteer lobbyist. I found this opportunity through Ana and have learned so much about the practical applications of overcoming political and legal barriers that come along with healthcare. Through this experience, I learned how to work with policy makers, the media, and local communities to create change in fields I was passionate about. I got to lobby in Congress and meet with representatives to advocate for prominent global health crises and work towards increasing US funding for these issues. I learned how much work it takes to overcome some barriers. I also learned that the best way to overcome these barriers is by working with other people. I have found that being a part of a team is very important because it allows you to go through different ideas and come up with a plan and eventually go through all possible outcomes. This experience also taught me that tasks will always seem daunting as a hypothetical, but once you actually start the task with the right help, you learn that things can be so much easier and clearer to complete.

I also served as a Resident Assistant to freshmen, and to more recently a Greek fraternity. Through the variety of experiences I had with this role, I saw a lot of different people and more importantly, learned how to connect my major to a lot of different disciplines. I met people from all different backgrounds and realized that I could relate to at least a part of their education through specific parts of my major. This role really helped me understand the meaning of having an interdisciplinary plan of study and why it is so important to be interdisciplinary. I also changed a lot through this role as I learned more about responsibility and core values and becoming someone I was proud of. We had a variety of trainings and discussions that taught me about the community around me, of both Drexel and Philadelphia as a whole. I learned about the systemic issues that we face as society today and though we could never learn how to overcome this issues in an hour long training, the larger RA group taught me a lot about how to start such conversations and make people comfortable enough to share their own stories and experiences. I learned a lot about being vulnerable which I have found to be one of the keys to success in entrepreneurship or any other field you may end up going into.

Overall, I think that there are so many experiences and classes that have fundamentally shaped my time at Drexel. A huge part of that is shaped by the people I met and the relationships I built with my peers and mentors. I only have the fondest memories to look back on in my time with the Custom-Designed Major Program and I am so excited to see what comes next of this project.