Biomedical Engineering

I was more-or-less not allowed to major in architecture when I first enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis in 2007. But then again, I didn’t have any desire to at that point in time. I don’t think I’ve ever stepped foot in the art or architecture building at WUSTL. I was interested in pursuing a career that at least paid me for my God-given talents. WashU is a premed school and so I felt, in many ways, that being a surgeon was sort of a similar deal to architecture in the sense that at least I would be able to afford a decent looking house. Having a nice, tidy house isn’t so much about materialism as much as about having a peace of mind–everything seems to go back to mental health for me.

Biomedical engineering seemed like an analogous major to architecture. It’s a mix of math, science, engineering, and a little business actually. It just lacked the visual artistic component, which again doesn’t really pay. Biomedical engineering was honestly a pretty intense major. It was extremely broad in that you had to take courses in engineering (which is already pretty broad), mathematics, writing and the sciences, which at WashU was really competitive because of all the premeds. In fact, biology, which I’ve always thought of as a relatively easy subject to understand was paradoxically consistently my worst subject at WashU likely because of how competitive it was at the institution. Yet, that challenge was what also drew me towards medical school with the primary question being: why couldn’t I do this thing which I perceived to be not very difficult?