The desk

I spent this morning clearing my desk at the office where I spent a year. It’s a bittersweet moment. On one hand, I’m saying goodbye to a field that I’ve spent six years in. I’ve mentioned previously that MRI is a very electrical engineering- and physics-heavy area. As a biomedical engineer who went to medical school, I didn’t feel I had the foundational technical training to rise to the level of an expert in this field, nor did I have a profound interest or genuine curiosity for MRI. I think I was just really impressed with my graduate school PI, both as a person and as a scholar, and I wanted to work with her. In my mind, this next transition makes the most sense. 

As I begin to transition from one desk at USC to another at SCI-Arc, I can’t help but wonder what new challenges will come before me. Architecture school is, at the end of the day, only three years for me. While that may seem like a long time for the average student, for someone who’s had the path that I’ve had (medical school, research, graduate school, postdoctoral fellowship), three years is absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. I will have plenty of time after I graduate to practice, and architecture is fittingly known as a profession where practitioners peak later in life: it’s not like I’m aspiring to be a professional athlete or anything.