Part 1 #CareerReflections: Pursuing, thriving in and then quitting hospital based healthcare
I was raised in a tier-2 city in India. Limited resources. Limited access and awareness about the broader opportunities in the world — and I could go on — but there was one incident that left its mark on me. It would go on to shape how I would make choices in the future.
During my early teenage years, my mother’s health suffered. It started with an infection, and the so-called-expert physician jumped to the conclusion of “Let’s go have surgery!” without even considering the need for a detailed diagnostic evaluation. Her point was: “Hey look! I know this clearly. Why should you waste time and all the additional money on several diagnostic tests when I know it clearly from experience?”
We fell for it and following the surgery my mother faced several complications. I had a hard time watching her go through this ordeal. To rub salt into the wounds, we learned a few years later that the surgery was completely unnecessary, and we had had a case like the ones Robert M. Pearl describes in his book Mistreated. It was painful to learn that this ailment could have been treated non-invasively with an MRI-guided focused ultrasound.
I was disgusted, and like many others around me, had begun losing trust in the healthcare system. I did dream of changing all this as a 14-year-old, but I did not like the system of biology/medicine education in India. My sister had gone through it in pre-university college and to me the experience looked much of a memory testing exercise, while I cared too much about the curiosity and experimentation aspects of learning. So, given my interests inclined towards engineering and innovation, I did not think I would ever change anything in the healthcare industry.
Not everyone knows this, but in India, we must pre-decide our majors even before we start the four-year undergraduate program. Given my love for Math and Newtonian mechanics, a mechanical engineering program made sense. But I went in without an exact idea of what job I was going to do eventually.
It actually helped to go in with an open mind as it gave the freedom to try different things. But it became clear to me within the first year that I was not interested in building cars, heavy machinery, or some cool software — most engineering graduates of India end up working in one of these areas. Yet I cared about innovation, design and how technology could bring impact. I simply would not stop seeking until I found the thing I was meant to do.
Call it destiny or luck or something else, I got an opportunity to work for a hospital beds manufacturing company. I still recall joining there on my 19th birthday and getting exposed to use cases of designing beds for patients with major burn injuries. Besides, I got to see various hospital equipment that engineers were designing. It was happening right here, in India, and I or my peers did not know about it until then. I was still called crazy to be thinking of going in this direction. I was reminded by many that “your undergrad major defines your destiny” when you are in the engineering job market after graduation.
I took my final report from that internship to a Professor (Vasant Kamath) and he took a good couple of days to review it. I felt it was justified because no one else in my department was exploring things beyond racing cars and industrial machines!
“Are you sure you did all of this by yourself?” he said with a surprised look. I nodded nervously.
He smiled, acknowledged the effort, and then helped me get on to another cross-departmental healthcare project. We built a remote patient monitoring concept, and then another neonatal healthcare project followed which I got to do with a pan-India student team through the GE Foundation.
These experiences made me think and reflect a lot about pursuing a career in healthcare. I thought this was my calling, something I was meant to do as my small attempt at fixing what I had witnessed while growing up. I was aware that I lacked a proper academic training in Bio-design (no concept of electives, back then!) but I felt confident that my project experiences would make up for it.
But then, in the final year, the prophecy of the job market’s reality seemed to be coming true. This was 2011, and I could not find a single alumnus with my major who had landed their first full-time job out of college in healthcare. It was too much tension to handle in this pursuit of a passion.
Due to some financial responsibilities that were coming my way right after graduation, I hesitantly sat for campus job placements. Car manufacturers. Software services. I got offers in both. But I knew my heart longed for something else, in a totally opposite direction.
What could I do?
(to be continued in Part 2)
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This is Part 1 in a series of posts about my choices leading to pursuing, thriving in and then quitting a career in hospital based healthcare. My hope is to help students and early career professionals understand the value of pursuing meaning over the next most logical thing that should go on one’s resume.
