Thanksgiving Dessert. For most families it is often the dinner, the sides, and the cooking of the Turkey that dictates the meal, and yet for mine it is the finale. The dessert, or more specifically the pie. The saying “easy as pie” does not apply to the Pradeep household, as there often is nothing more difficult than deciding on a pie, and to me this parallelled selecting my major.
The Crust
At age 8, I found myself travelling from hospital to hospital, each month to a different blood test as they prodded with no success. I was an “unanswered question of nature”, an anomaly. With the tools of the future, we can create disease detection and prevention technology, harnessing the ability of the telomerase ribonucleoprotein to control division and provide cell life longevity. The future can be a world where cancer is conquered, and unknown disorders can be managed without ordeal. Biomedical Engineering gave me the opportunity to traverse into this arena of discovering the answers to these unanswerable questions. The ability to create new devices to prevent the difficulty of hospital hopping for a new generation of pediatric patients within the major motivated me to place a check in the box next to the words “Biomedical Engineering” that sat on the screen before me. Researching and developing a method of detecting disorders and immune deficiencies in patients, and creating a world in which cancer is perpetually detected at Stage 1 is the job of biomedical engineers. The crust of the pie was thus placed in the bottom of the pan setting a solid base layer for the dessert to be crafted.
The Filling
With my crust laid down before me, I began looking within myself to find where my interests lay. To me this was the biggest challenge. I loved math, finding the one definite solution, or lack thereof to each problem akin to a puzzle. enjoyed the struggle of working through a problem and the satisfaction of drawing a box around the final destination of my mathematical journey through the numbers provided. However, my heart beats for biology, both metaphorically and physically. Learning about the hierarchy from cells to ecological systems gave me a drive to keep learning. Yet, oddly enough nothing had my adrenaline pumping more than physics and computer science.Each line of code, or each step to balance a static system came together like a perfect mosaic, crafting a program or building a system. Suddenly, the question of what I was most interested in became harder than most of the physics and math problems that I was being told to solve. For me it was not a one word answer, rather a run on sentence strung together with ands and ors. With parents who attended college overseas, and as an older sister, I found no one to turn to for the answer. That’s when I found my perfect pie filling. I didn’t have to choose one, rather a mixed berry center. Biomedical Engineering, made up of not one but three different word roots: bio, medical, and engineering. The study of life, the study of health systems, and engineering, encompassing the math, physics and computer science I held so dear.
The Lattice
Still the pie felt incomplete. Though the crust and berries were laid down, I was missing the lattice atop the pie. This lattice of interweaved dough to me, was not only the opportunities and future that lay ahead in the biomedical engineering field, but also the incredible community. As a student who has to fly 6 hours before reaching her college campus, these are the people that truly made a university a home. They motivate each other to keep pushing, even through classes such as BME 202, where our excel sheets to model a neural circuit often takes a half hour to run before the errors appear. These students are never afraid to provide a helping hand, create a study group, and help you find your passions. I cannot be more thankful for the amazing people that I surround myself with within my major, and they truly are the people that make this pie complete because without them, it simply would not be held together.
