Engineering Tahsin Bari

I don’t like hospitals. Sharp needles, surgeon’s scalpels and other tools aren’t really my forte. Add to that the freezing air, devoid of any impurities, the impersonal white from ceiling to floor, and the moans and groans of patients in pain; a hospital seems to be an enterprise of misery.

Yet I work in a hospital. And enjoy it. How? I guess because I’m not the patient in the stretcher and because I get to care for people. But aren’t there other ways to care for people, like being a social worker, or a police officer? Yes, those are other professions where I could help people, but I prefer working in the medical field because I am most interested in the physical aspect of a person’s health. In my opinion, everything else for a person can be fixed if they are physically healthy. In fact, I want to be at the very root of a person’s health, which is why I want to be a researcher. If I’m a biomedical researcher, I will get to create all of the medicines and other technologies that are used to treat patients.

When I was shadowing in a lab, I saw that many of the procedures that biomedical engineers used were based off principles of chemistry. One of such was how the engineers determined levels of potassium and oxygen in blood; the...