Why am I a Biomedical Engineer?

It helps to understand who I am by understanding the decisions I made in my life to lead to this career path. I have never been very good an answering those questions where you have to define yourself or your ambitions in a way that others would understand. I had that frustration all the way back as a child in school. On the board: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. Little Oisin only wanted to use his imagination and play with Lego for the rest of his life. So, I drew a picture of the biggest, most badass, Lego kingdom, and wrote under it that I wanted to be a “Legoist”, creating and designing for the rest of my life. I didn’t put any more thought into it, mostly because, for me, it just made sense that I would be a creative problem solver for the rest of my life. A decade later, filling out college applications, the career guidance counselor told me “Legoist is not an option, just put down Engineer”.

In my first two years of studying general engineering I found a love for mechanical, then civil, then computers, followed close by electronics. At this point, one may think I was very quick to fall in love, that is if they hadn’t seen how the rest of my college life was going. Suddenly, I was faced with deciding what discipline of engineering I would specialize in for the next three years. Seeing as I had cycled through almost all of them, I figured I was next due to fall in love with the last option, biomedical engineering, and I was right.

I could talk about how I loved my classes, or the work I excelled at, but I really started to understand that I had made the right decision because of one day. It started in a stuffy lecture theater, with glaring slides, lines of text and gory graphics, and ended with my mother in hospital that evening, the same medical device on her wrist. Biomedical engineering was my major at this point, and a case-study of a vascular closure device was the topic that day. And there that device was, holding my mother’s radial artery closed after her emergency angiogram.

With the whole family crowded in the tiny hospital room, mum, trying to squirm out of the spotlight, asked “what did you learn in classes today?”. My younger sister started talking about her lecture on the representation of blind people in the old testament, mum was not too impressed… It was my turn to shine, and with the best of intentions, I began to discuss the intricacies of the medical device on mum’s wrist, how it was designed, how it works, and horror storied of it failing, blood squirting across the room… “Oisin, stop talking!”. Mum was not too impressed with that one either. Forgive me, I was even younger then than I am now.

Although I didn’t really understand it at the time, that day was very profound for me. It was that reaffirming moment in my life that told me, what I am doing is right for me. I work in medical device design today, and while working on any device or concept, I still ask myself, am I happy to think this will be used on my mother? If that makes me a mammy’s boy, then so be it!