Part 2 #CareerReflections: Pursuing, thriving in and then quitting hospital based healthcare
(Link to Part 1 of the series)
I decided to give up those lucrative job offers, in pursuit of what felt like a true calling.
After a lot of hustling, I had landed an internship to work on medical device innovations at GE’s Jack Welch Technology Center. It was a 12-month contract with about a fourth of the full-time pay and signing up would mean giving away the offers I had on the table. I knew this meant having to continue my freelance writing jobs on the sides to support my parents.
People warned me that the place I was going to was known to hire tens of interns every year, but also had the reputation of letting go almost all of them without full-time offers. They could not understand why I was putting myself under uncertainty — an early-career risk and a financial risk — when I had other offers.
Within myself, I knew I had felt immense passion for this area of work, and I could not do just another job out there. So, I signed up and showed up on the first day of 2012.
Right in the first month, my boss broke this news to me that I should keep an eye out for jobs outside the company, as they only hired interns with a bio-medical engineering background. Yet, with continued meaningful contributions and more hustling, I managed to secure the most coveted entry-level leadership program job in about 4 months. I could not believe it when the HR manager decided to cut short my internship contract to put me on the full-time position (and pay!) within 6 months of joining. It was a true ‘pursuit of happiness’ moment for me!
Now, I could not have predicted all this at the outset. I just knew that it would not have happened without that initial leap of faith and some calculated risk taking. Until this point, I only knew there were ten other paths I could confidently say no to. But, from now on, I was sure this was my one path to look forward to. I went from feeling like being punished for going against the tide (questioning the system of job recruiting for engineering grads in India) to being on a path of fulfilment.
The following years were not easy by any means. I would go into every rotational assignment knowing nothing, getting humbled by all the expertise around me but eventually walking out with tons of learning, at least one tangible accomplishment I could be identified with, and great relationships with colleagues.
Two products — the Aisys CS2 anesthesia system and the Discovery Cath lab — still remain very close to my heart because of the sheer amount of effort my team members and I put in to bring them to reality. There are some personal reasons too that I will touch upon later.
Getting to spend time in hospitals next to doctors and clinicians was fascinating. At times, I got to see some live surgeries! Empathy for users (patients and technicians) and design thinking were two skills that came in when I had least expected to learn anything about them.
Along the way, I had the chance to get mentored by several incredible people who guided me and furthered my interest for healthcare innovation — most notably, two passionate technology executives at GE and a genius physician-plus-technologist from Mass General Hospital in Boston who’s work convinced me to start volunteering for his affordable healthcare non-profit CAMTech.
More than 4 years passed by. Each one of them had brought in new roles, along with leadership opportunities and organizational challenges.
But despite all this fulfillment of working on something meaningful to me, I would often end my weeks deeply thinking about the impact of my work. In the field, I would see many incorrect practices in hospitals and diagnostic centers, and I would question myself about how much of a fundamental change could my work eventually bring to this giant healthcare system.
I would ask, “Is there one person I personally know that I have impacted?”
I kept seeking answers. It was only in early 2017 that I finally got one!
(to be continued in Part 3)
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
This is Part 2 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.
(Link to Part 1 of the series)
