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       I decided I want to become a BME because I viewed it as a way where I could help people without being a doctor. Everybody always talks about they want to become a doctor or become a nurse because they want to help people. I wanted to help people, but I didnât really think medical school was my thing. I wanted to find a way that I could still get that feeling of helping people; I wanted to contribute to making somebodyâs life better. I saw BME as a way to do that. Even before I really focused my interest more on the pure research side of things. If you work for a medical device company, youâre making products that make peopleâs lives better.
I would consider myself more of a scientist than an engineer which is probably why I was drawn a lot more to a lab research. I think if BME didnât exist I wouldnât have been an engineering major, I would have been a Biology major or biochemistry major. I found out about BME when I probably in 9th grade and really latched onto it because I thought it was really cool.  I obviously always loved science but I always liked math too, so I liked the fact that it was a major that incorporated both subjects. That duality is really what drew me to BME. Iâm definitely more of a science person than an engineering person, I would never have considered being an ME or IE or anything of that sort.
           I did a lot of research and internships; I worked in Doctor Lopakaâs lab for all four undergraduate years, though I honestly donât know how I got to bein that specific lab. I knew I wanted to get involved in research, so early on in my freshman year I started pulling the different professors in BME, reading up on what they did in each of their labs. I found two or three of them that really sparked my interest, so I emailed them saying âhey I think what you are doing in your lab is really interesting, would you mind if we sat down and talked about it for 30 or 40 minutes.â My mental plan was to gain some recognition so I could come back and try to be in their lab the following year. When I met with Doctor Lopaka she offered me a spot in her lab after we finished talking. I didnât think it was possible, not having taken a BME course yet, to land a research position. It really worked out to my advantage in that I both got in to a lab so early, and was able tostay in that lab consistently for all of school.
           Summer my sophomore year I went to Singapore and spent three months working at a lab at the National University of Singapore. I researched abroad rather than studied because I came in with enough AP credit to fulfill the required Humanity electives, and there was no study abroad program then that covered any kind of BME credits. So I went to the department and asked them if they had any contacts to do research abroad, they said they really didnât know anything, but, if you could get something set up you can still apply for the various study abroad scholarships to help pay for it. I believe I came across Singapore while looking at various schools that the Tech BME department had relationships with to some capacity, in the hopes of finding a place that I could go that would actually know Georgia Tech and its program, thinking they might be willing to let me come. I went through places that seemed like interesting places to go. Similar to what I initially did here at Tech, I went through various professorsâ information online; finding a couple doing research that was really interesting in Singapore. I emailed two professors, explaining to them that I wanted to come work in their lab for this summer, free of charge, and that I just need someone to take me in. Both professors that I emailed told me that if I could just get myself there, that I was welcome to work in their lab 40 hours a week, and they would show me the ropes.
           I spend three months over there working in a lab which was a lot of fun. It was very different from a studying abroad program in that I got be over there all by myself; I wasnât surrounded by a bunch of Georgia Tech kids speaking English, hanging out together, having the same experiences, and similar backgrounds. I went over there living in a student hostile full of people that spoke tons of different languages and zero or very little, broken English. I had to find my way around the city on public transport because I didnât get to live in dorms on campus because I wasnât a student. I was just working. So it definitely made it for a very different experience than a normal study abroad. I think it was really good to be independent and be on my own for three months in a totally foreign place. I got to do a lot of traveling too which was a big thing that I wanted to get out of it, I always loved to travel so I always knew I wanted to do something abroad and have that experience, so it worked out well.
           The summer after junior year I stayed domestic as I wanted to see the other side of things. Everything I had done at that point was research at the university.  I wanted to stick with conducting research, but look into research in industry. So I worked at a pharmaceutical company called Guilets Sciences. I worked at the now nonexistent North Carolina location and did industrial pharmaceutical research for that summer to view a different side of the coin: and I actually enjoyed the industry side as well. Before I got the unfortunate news that no one was hiring research when I graduated due to the economic downturn, I was very open to both industry and academic research. I honestly still would be; when I was applying for jobs to ultimately land this job at Emory, I was looking for both industry and academic research. I just wanted to air more on the academic side than the development of a medical device or the testing of a product.
           I was exposed to animal research initially here at Tech. Dr. Wilcoxâs lab does some animal work as well. So, even as an undergrad, it was something that I got exposure to. But even before seeing it first hand, itâs always been something that I wasnât opposed to, so long as it was done properly. Obviously, thereâs people out there who are gonna screw all the rules and regulations that are in place and do things that are horrible, and I would never able to be a part of that. But having worked with animals, you see all the regulations that are in place and all the extremely strenuous approvals you have to go through to even get anything through. And itâs very obvious that the procedures that are in place do a very good job of making sure that people donât abuse the power of working with animals. I very much viewed it as more of a necessary evil, as long as itâs done properly. However, when you look at the things that have come out of animal research, there are things that I really donât think that we would have been able to learn and discover in any other way. So if you eliminate animal research in its entirety, you set us back so far.
           Not everything can be done with just a sound model or a computer model. Not to give you accurate data at least. Look at drug trials where you start out with living cells. Then you move it up into mice, then you move it up into rats, then you move it up into rabbits, and then you move it up into humans. A lot of times, somewhere along the line it stops working. It might work great on the mice and rats, but then you get to rabbits and something goes wrong, and it doesnât work like it was before. Without animals, you wouldnât be able to get that process, and youâd just be like âOh, it works great on these cells, so letâs go inject it into some humanâ and something awful is going to happen. Again, it comes into the necessary evil kind of aspect to it. But once you start doing it, itâs something that you choose to get involved in. You see that the people that are involved with it really do care about the animals, and theyâre not just viewed as a waste, castoff by product. âItâs always just a little mouseâ. They donât like having to sacrifice the animals, but thereâs a respect that goes along with it. There are always the few exceptions of people that do awful things. But the majority, really respect them and weâre able to learn from animals information we wouldnât be able to learn without them.
           Transitioning from college to the first job, I was definitely actively looking because I just graduated and needed to make money. I didnât start actively looking until the end of my senior year, because at the very end of junior year I was still deciding in my mind whether I wanted to go to grad school or if I wanted to get a job. And it was pretty late in junior year, maybe a little early into senior year that I ultimately decided in my head that I was a bit burned out of school and that I needed a break and needed to do something different. Maybe in the future I would go back and get another degree, but for now I was ready to be done. So, I definitely started actively looking; I applied for over a 100 jobs. It was a really good thing that I planned. I planned my schedules throughout college so that throughout my senior year I took 14 hours my 1st semester and 12 hours my last semester. Of those 12 hours, I had Senior Design, which obviously you canât avoid, I had my economics requirement, I had my history requirement, and I had Psychology 1101. I basically frontloaded my schedule so that by the end of senior year, I didnât have any hardcore taxing classes, other than senior design.
That was kind of an added benefit to it, that I really didnât really think about when I started frontloading my schedule and making my second semester of senior year really light. My thought was that Senior Design was a huge timesuck, and I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to focus on senior design and do what I needed to do for that without it detracting from a 4000 level BME class. But, an added benefit that I ended up having with that was that it did give me a lot more time to focus on the job search, which ended up being necessary because of the way the economy was.
When I graduated in May of â09, the economy was at a low. This made job searching very interesting. Ideally, I wanted to get into a lab research job, which I have now at Emory, but with the economy fallout labs were not hiring because getting funding for lab research was horrid.  At this point I was applying for a variety of things from RND jobs to the field Engineer jobs To the Regulatory affairs job, I was even looking at medical device sales; I was basically applying to a little bit of everything. I found it all interesting because the job market was a little rough so this kind of just what ended up working out and it came to a job offer at Saint Jude Medical.
So it ended up being a gratuitous accident, I guess you could say, because I didnât think about that and how it might play out at the time, but it ended up working out really well. I actually got my job offer the day before graduation. My parents were in town, and we were out playing golf with my then boyfriend. I was in the middle of the golf course, and I knew I was waiting on a phone call, so even though I was on a golf course I still had my phone on. I heard my phone ringing, and I went off to the side of the green and I answered this phone call, and got the offer. I was literally jumping up and down on the golf course, because I had been freaking out that I was going to graduate without a job. A lot of people were graduating without jobs; I wouldnât have been in a tiny minority. I was very excited, it was a great graduation present, to say the least.
           After I graduated Georgia Tech, I worked at St. Jude Hospital as a regulatory affairs associate. The regulatory affairs pretty much paves the way between the company and the FDA, along with the similar groups like FDA for all the other countries around the world. They all have their own version. So basically once the product is developed and they do all the RND and all the testing, then we are the ones that take all that information and put it together to present to the FDA so they can approve the product and it can go into the market. This is the last line of defense before a product can be sold.
At my job with St. Jude, I worked a pretty standard 8 to 5 position. I worked in an office park, a big building that housed all the different departments, and everybody pretty much came in at 8, and worked until 5. Everyday, I got to live in a cubicle, and I really donât like cubicles. which further emphasized that I prefer working more in a lab environment than a cube environment. If youâre going to be working in industry, if youâre going to be an industry engineer, that cube environment tends to come with territory. But, there were a lot of meetings: that was the biggest thing. You kind of alternated your day between writing and researching information and meetings. I was usually on anywhere from 3 to 6 different project teams at any given time. Some of them were for brand new products, some of them for changes for existing products, and I was the regulatory affairs representative for each of these teams. On any given day, a couple of teams might have a meeting, whether itâs a full team meeting with the product management and with the R & D engineers and with the marketing folks and with the manufacturing folks and with us, or maybe just a smaller meeting with the couple of R & D folks and me because they want to run a couple of ideas by regulatory affairs. So, sometimes it varied in terms of what types of meetings I had. Between the meetings I would work on writing the submissions and prepping all the information for projects that were further on in the timeline that were getting closer to submission. Some of the projects were only a couple months long if they needed a quick small change. Some of the other projects could last a couple years if it was for a brand new product, or if it was a completely new technology.
  With regulatory affairs I donât feel like we had those kind of [tough Biomedical] obstacles as much because it could be a totally new product, but the FDA already has it guidelines about how you approach each different situation. They pretty much covered their bases in that most everything falls somewhere in their guide line. Sometimes it gets a little grey whether it falls into area A or area B. But, thereâs never something that the FDA failed to consider.
I wouldnât say itâs normal to stand up for yourself all the time during board meetings. That time it was the 1st project where I worked on my own. I think a lot of what led to that incident was the other engineers trying to test me, and see how far they could go. They wanted to see if I would back down or if I would stick to what I thought was the proper method. If the VP tells them that what Iâm telling them is right, then it makes it a little bit harder for them to question me. Versus if they go over my head and the VP agrees with them, then I lose a lot of credibility. I didnât love the fact that they went over my head. It frustrated me a little bit at the time because I felt like I was being undermined but ultimately I think it ended up working out for the best. They never did it again after that project, so I think it was their way of testing me. Maybe a little bit of hazing for the newbie. A lot of times, the development folks really tried to skip the line. You could be debating between two different processes, and one could probably make a good argument that both processes could work. The development ones tend to take the more aggressive approach whereas regulatory affairs, at least from what I saw, tend to be a little more conservative. Once you tick the FDA off, it takes a while to get back into their good graces. Whether itâs trying to push things through a less strenuous review process then what they ultimately deserve or whether itâs submitting applications that donât really have complete information and they have to come back and ask you for additional information. Pretty much, there is no submission that goes through without some questions. If you are really not complete in what youâre presenting the FDA doesnât really like it. This is because the development folks donât work directly with the FDA. Theyâre not the ones that the FDA goes back to when youâre not doing things right. A lot of times they tend to be a bit more aggressive because the faster you get a product to the market the faster you can start selling it. Then the faster the company starts making money from it. Itâs more that they come at it from a different angle and a different prospective.
 Every companyâs going to run it a little differently, and I saw from my training in one division versus actually working in the division that hired me, that the two divisions run their regulatory departments differently. The division that I was in, everyone in the department worked on submissions to the FDA and to TUV, which is basically the FDA for European Union. Certain individuals were assigned other regions that they were also responsible for other territories. I was responsible for about half of South East Asia and Australia, pretty much from the get-go. And then about midway through, I also picked up all of Central and South America.
           I had a lot of countries. In addition to writing my own submissions for my project teams, I communicated with various representatives in country, for each of those countries. We had St. Jude representatives in all of the countries, or over all those countries. Like in Central and South America we had one representative who was the in country person for all of them.
I believe the research I did on Southeast Asia, Australia, and Central America helped be with my global perspective. Ultimately while I was given Southeast Asia in the first place is because I had experience with Southeast Asia already. I couldnât speak Chinese or Thai or Japanese or any of the sorts but I at least had experience working with people in that territory and working with the language barrier. I spent the summer with a bunch of people where English wasnât their first language and even all the ones that could speak it, it was a lot more broken than fluent. Being able to work with the language barrier is the reason I think they put me in that position. I definitely think it helps because in these countries people are more fluent in English than a person I would meet down the street in Singapore. Even if youâre not fluent, think about the language and words and terminology in whatever language it is that you studied. Itâs going to be a lot more basic words. Itâs not going to be the high up technical information. A lot of times you need to explain things and present things in a different way to the person in that country to help them understand it because theyâre not going to know all of the advanced terminology in English. The depth of terminology is fine, if you could speak Chinese to them, but I canât speak Chinese. Sometimes, they would come back with a question and I would try to explain it to them but you can tell that some thing was not clicking. Therefore, you have to be able to understand that sometimes you have to approach it in a different way because of that language barrier.Â
           Some of the countries in South America I was working with were brand new countries for St. Jude to even market to, so they had nothing registered at all because we never sold product there. So I had to go through and find the most up to date information on these older products that weâve had all our other big main countries for a long time. The information on those older submissions isnât accurate anymore, so I had to research and find the proper information to be giving to these countries so that they could make their registrations. So it kind of varied from day to day, but it was mostly bouncing between different projects, so thereâs a lot of time management involved. If thereâs a really busy week, where you need to get this out ASAP, or this needs to be due, or the engineers need this for x, y, and z, you ask yourself what things can maybe go on the backburner and wait till the end of the week, or maybe till early the next week. The time management skills you learn in college really do come in handy!
           Out of college I wish I could have gotten into a research job, whether it was in the industry or academic, right out of school versus spending the two and a half years in the business side of the industry. Obviously, there are different aspects of industry. Thereâs a part of me that wish I would have started in research because I knew when I was graduating that thatâs what I would have preferred. But, on the flip side I gained a lot of great experience at St. Jude and I was able to cover a lot of areas that I donât think I would have gotten to if I was strictly in research. For example, regulatory affairs are a type of technical writing; itâs basically every submission we make to every agency. So I think that experience, now that Iâm back in research, is going to be beneficial when it comes to writing papers and writing graphs because thatâs technical writing. Plus, I was able to do some really neat things such as the training program in California where I got to spend 10 months with the division out there. I had never been to California until I started that. I got to spend 9 months living outside of Los Angeles in the suburbs and I spent another month living outside the bay area and got to travel and do a lot of things out there that I probably would not have got if I was in the research industry. Because I was working with Southeast Asia as one of my territories, they held a regulatory affairs conference that all the representatives for Southeast Asia from all four divisions as well as the in-country representatives met in Malaysia for a four day conference. Since I was a representative for Southeast Asia for my division I got to go, so I do think that would be some very good experiences. That was a great company and I worked with great people but the job wasnât something I could see myself doing long term. I tend to have the belief that I donât regret much that I do in life so long as I like where Iâm ultimately at. Even if I did something a different way, then would I have ended up in the same place I am now? I tend to believe things happen for a reason and it ultimately works out the way itâs supposed to. I have ultimately been able to the research that I wanted to do, but I got some great experiences in a different area along the way that potentially puts me in a better position for research. Things have worked out in a way that I like, so it makes it hard to say that I regret a choice that happened along the way.
           But, looking at this job at Emory, I was again actively searching, and I guess the biggest reason that I had to end up actively searching was because I was completely changing career paths. I was going from a regulatory affairs office position at a medical device company to wanting to get back in research, either in academia or in pharmaceuticals; totally different. So, when youâre looking to make that big of a change, opportunities arenât as much going to fall in your lap as much as when you are in your right career path and doing what you want to do, working your way up a ladder. Even when I was in regulatory affairs, I had recruiters that would call, every month or two, that would call about different regulatory affairs positions in different companies in different cities. If regulatory affairs were where I saw myself staying, I definitely would have had the ability to advance myself and move up the ladder, and change areas and change companies without having to actively seek it out. But, with wanting to make as big of a switch with what I was doing by getting back into lab, I had to actively seek that out.Â
For my current job I am a research specialist. I work in a lab in the physiology department at Emory and my lab focuses on multiple sclerosis; more specifically, trying to understand the implication process and what factors and mechanisms are involved in the whole process behind MS. It is a brand new research; the lab I am in is brand new and itâs less than a year old at this point. The professor recently finished his post-doc up at Stanford and took up this job at Emory. This is his first lab that he is actually the head of and we are really small; itâs just him, myself, and one other research specialist. With such a small group, I really get to be hands on and fully involved in everything. A lot of the times in the bigger labs you get your own segment of the project and outside of monthly lab meetings you donât so much know what the other segments are doing. The simplified version of our labwork would be that we are trying to understand the mechanism and if we can figure out the mechanism then the big drug company can take what we learn and try and make a drug to target it.
But, as for research, I wouldnât even say itâs so much big picture things that prove to be obstacles, but the week to week and the month to month problems. You spend multiple weeks writing a long term experiment, and it doesnât work. Or, similarly, you run an experiment once and it works great, and your try replicate your results and it fails. You run into the problem to figuring out what went wrong. For example, at one point we were doing a lot of animal work, using a mouse model to study MS. So we would do a lot of multi-week animal experiments. In one case, we had one test that worked great and we got results, only to run it again and have it fail. The results didnât even make sense. Even the controls that should have worked one way, without an issue, werenât working the way they should have. And we were sitting there asking âdid we use a different lot number on various reagents?â âDid the animal facility people feed the mice and clean out the cages?â âDid some one accidentally swap the cage cards on our cages in the middle of the experiment, so that the mice we were seeing were the controls?â We were just trying to figure out what mightâve gone wrong to explain what we were seeing. Sometimes it happens on smaller scales, sometimes on bigger scales, where the large experiment crashes and burns. Luckily, experiments donât go wrong too often, but when they do, things can get pretty hard. Oh, the joys of research!
           In regards to a going back to school, I donât see myself as becoming a professor. Even if I did decide to go back to school I donât see myself going quite that far. Honestly, at this point if I went back to school it would probably be for a masterâs in probably immunology. The lab Iâm in now, thereâs a lot of immunology work. Which is kind of one thing that Iâve found Iâm lacking a little bit, being in this lab, because a BME degree really doesnât give you much in the way of an immunology background. So Iâve been having to learn things as I go when it comes to the more technical immunology information. My professorâs actually going to have me audit the senior level immunology course in the spring, just to kind of catch up on the stuff that BME didnât cover, that, one of the more pure sciences degree might have. But I think I would more stick to the masters level, which can help me move up within a lab, to maybe being more of a lab manager underneath the professor whoâs actually the person running the lab. Kind of being able to be in a position where I can mentor people below me in a lab position. Versus right now, I donât have anybody reporting to me. So I think that would be one thing that would be really nice to work toward in the future and kind of put myself in the position for.
           When I worked at St. Jude, the division I was a part of had spinal cord stimulation via tortonic pain as their focus. These are people who have spent years in pain every day where it just hurts them to move and get out of bed. With everything they do they are in so much pain, that even narcotics canât cover it, itâs just miserable. These people go into so much depression, and they lose their jobs, they lose their families, they lose their friends, because they just canât function. Being able to see what the products that Iâm helping to get to market are doing to help these people, I can still see where Iâm really benefiting people. When I was working for the pharmaceuticals company, itâs kind of obvious how if you get a drug to market, it will really help those people that have the disease or the condition that the drug is for. When I was working on Hepatitis B drugs for that summer, I knew that creating a drug would make life easier for people with Hepatitis B. For MS, even though itâs a bit farther removed for this job, if we can figure out something significant with the process that somebody can make a drug for, that will be great forpeople that are suffering from MS. So, I really feel like no matter what area of the whole spectrum of things you can do with BME that you wind up in, itâs really easy to see how the things that BMEâ s do really help people.
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Transcribed Edited Interview
Transcribed Edited Interview
           After I graduated Georgia Tech, I worked at St. Jude Hospital as a regulatory affairs associate. The regulatory affairs pretty much paves the way between the company and the FDA, along with the similar groups like FDA for all the other countries around the world. They all have their own version. So basically once the product is developed and they do all the RND and all the testing, then we are the ones that take all that information and put it together to present to the FDA so they can approve the product and it can go into the market. This is the last line of defense before a product can be sold.
 When I graduated in May of â09, the economy was at a low. This made job searching very interesting. My ideal was to get into a lab research job, which I have now at Emory, but with the economy fallout labs were not hiring because getting funding for lab research was horrid.   At this point I was applying for a variety of things from RND jobs to the field Engineer jobs To the Regulatory affairs job, I was even looking at medical device sales; I was basically applying to a little bit of everything.  I found it all interesting because the job market was a little rough so this kind of just what ended up working out and it came to a job offer at Saint Jude Medical.
 I graduated with a BME pre-med degree, but I never seriously thought about medical school. I more just ended up being pre-med because I didnât want to cut the option out; unless they changed the curriculum, it only takes 2 or 3 additional classes from the standard BME degree to be pre-med.  If you want to go to med school you have to be pre-med, so I figured it would be worth it to take the couple of extra classes so I would have that option open to me should I decide later down the line that it was something I wanted to do. I also thought for a while about going to get my PhD,but by the time I graduated I was ready for a break from school.  I may go back and get a masters or PhD at some point.
 For my current job I am a research specialist. I work in a lab in the physiology department at Emory and my lab focuses on multiple sclerosis; more specifically, trying to understand the implication process and what factors and mechanisms are involved in the whole process behind MS. It is a brand new research, the lab I am in is brand new and itâs less than a year old at this point. the professor recently finished his post-doc up at Stanford and took up this job at Emory. This is his first lab that he is actually the head of and we are really small;  Itâs just myself, him, and one other research specialist. With such a small groupo I really get to be hands on and fully involved in everything. A lot of the times in the bigger labs you get your own segment of the project and outside of monthly lab meetings you donât so much know what the other segments are doing. The simplified version of our labwork would be that we are trying to understand the mechanism and if we can figure out the mechanism then the big drug company can take what we learn and try and make a drug to target it.
 I would consider myself more of a scientist than an engineer which is probably why I was drawn a lot more to a lab research.  I think if BME didnât exist I wouldnât have been an engineering major, I would have been a Biology major or biochemistry major so.  I found out about BME when I probably in 9th grade and really latched onto it because I thought it was really cool.  I obviously always loved science but I always liked math too, so I liked the fact the it was a major that incorporated both subjects.   That duality is really what drew me to BME.   Iâm definitely more of a science person than an engineering person, I would never have considered being an ME or IE or anything of that sort.
           I did a lot of research and internships; I worked in Doctor Lopakaâs lab for all four undergraduate years, though I honestly donât know how I got to bein that specific lab. I knew I wanted to get involved in research, so early on in my freshman year I started pulling the different professors in BME, reading up on what they did in each of their labs. I found two or three of them that really sparked my interest, so I emailed them saying âhey I think what you are doing in your lab is really interesting, would you mind if we sat down and talked about it for 30 or 40 minutes.â My mental plan was to  to gain some recognition so I could come back and try to be in their lab the following year. When I met with Doctor Lopaka she offered me a spot in her lab after we finished talking, I didnât think it was possible, not having taken a BME course yet, to land a research position.It really worked out to my advantage in that I both got in to a lab so early, and was able tostay in that lab consistently for all of school.
           Summer my sophomore year I went to Singapore and spent three months working at a lab at the National University of Singapore. I researched abroad rather than studied because I came in with enough AP credit to fulfill the required Humanity electives, and there was no study abroad program then that covered any kind of BME credits. So I went to the department and asked them if they had any contacts to do research abroad, they said they really didnât know anything but if you could get something set up you can still apply for the various study abroad scholarships to help pay for it. I believe I came across Singapore while looking at various schools that the Tech BME department had relationships with to some capacity, in terms of finding a place that I could go that would actually know Georgia Tech and its program; perhaps they would be willing to let me come. I went through places that seemed like interesting places to go. Similar to what I initially did here at Tech, I went through various professorsâ information online; finding a couple doing research that was really interesting in Singapore. I emailed two professors, explaining to them that I wanted to come work in their lab for this summer, free of charge, and that I just need someone to take me Both professors that I emailed told me that if I could just get myself there, that I was welcome to work in their lab 40 hours a week, and they would show me the ropes.
           I spend three months over there working in a lab which was a lot of fun. It was very different from a studying abroad program in that I got be over there all by myself; I wasnât surrounded by a bunch of Georgia Tech kids speaking English, hanging out together, having the same experiences, and similar backgrounds. I went over there living in a student hostile full of people that spoke tons of different languages and zero or very little, broken English. . I had to find my way around the city on public transport because I didnât get to live in dorms on campus because I wasnât a student. I was just working. So it definitely made it for a very different experience than a normal study abroad. I think it was really good to be independent and be on my own for three months in a totally foreign place. I got to do a lot of traveling too which was a big thing that I wanted to get out of it, I always loved to travel so I always knew I wanted to do something abroad and have that experience, so it worked out well.
           The summer after junior year I stayed domestic and I wanted to see the other side of things. Everything I had done at that point was research at the university.  I wanted to stick with  conductingresearch , but look into research in industry. So I worked at a pharmaceutical company called Guilets Sciences. I worked at the now nonexistent North Carolina location and did industrial pharmaceutical research for that summer to view a different side of the coin: and I actually enjoyed the industry side as well. Before I got the unfortunate news that no one was hiring research when I graduated due to the economic downturn, I was very open to both industry and academic research. I honestly still would be; when I was applying for jobs to ultimately land this job at Emory, I was looking for both industry and academic research. I just wanted to air more on the academic side than the development of a medical device or the testing of a product.
With regulatory affairs I donât feel like we had those kind of [tough Biomedical] obstacles as much because it could be a totally new product, but the FDA already has it guidelines about how you approach each different situation. They pretty much covered their bases in that most everything falls somewhere in their guide line. Sometimes it gets a little grey whether it falls into area A or area B. But, thereâs never something that the FDA failed to consider. But, as for research, I wouldnât even say itâs so much big picture things that prove to be obstacles, but the week to week and the month to month problems. You spend multiple weeks writing a long term experiment, and it doesnât work. Or, similarly, you run an experiment once and it works great, and your try replicate your results and it fails. You run into the problem to figuring out what went wrong. For example, at one point we  were doing a lot of animal work, using a mouse model to study MS. So we would do a lot of multi-week animal experiments. In one case, we had one test that worked great and we got results, only to run it again and have it fail. The results didnât even make sense. Even the controls that should have worked one way, without an issue, werenât working the way they should have. And we were sitting there asking â did we use a different lot number on various reagents?â âDid the animal facility people feed the mice and clean out the cages?â âDid some one accidentally swap the cage cards on our cages in the middle of the experiment, so that the mice we were seeing were the controls?âWe were just trying to figure out what mightâve gone wrong to explain what we were seeing. Sometimes it happens on smaller scales, sometimes on bigger scales, where the large experiment crashes and burns. Luckily, experiments donât go wrong too often, but when they do, things can get pretty hard. Oh, the joys of research!
At my job with St. Jude, I worked a pretty standard 8 to 5 position. I worked in an office park, a big building that housed all the different departments, and everybody pretty much came in at 8, and worked until 5. Everyday, I got to live in a cubicle, and I really donât like cubicles. which further emphasized that I prefer working more in a lab environment than a cube environment. If youâre going to be working in industry, if youâre going to be an industry engineer, that cube environment tends to come with territory. So I guess, itâs a good thing to know. But, there were a lot of meetings, that was the biggest thing. You kind of alternated your day between writing and researching information and meetings. I was usually on anywhere from 3 to 6 different project teams at any given time. Some of them were for brand new products, some of them for changes for existing products, and I was the regulatory affairs representative for each of these teams. On any given day, a couple of teams might have a meeting, whether itâs a full team meeting with the product management and with the R & D engineers and with the marketing folks and with the manufacturing folks and with us, or maybe just a smaller meeting with the couple of R & D folks and me because they want to run a couple of ideas by regulatory affairs. So, sometimes it varied in terms of what types of meetings I had. Between the meetings I would work on writing the submissions and prepping all the information for projects that were further on in the timeline that were getting closer to submission.. Some of the projects were only a couple months long if they needed a quick small change. Some of the other projects could last a couple years if it was for a brand new product, or if it wasa completely new technology.. Every companyâs going to run it a little differently, and I saw from my training in one division versus actually working in the division that hired me, that the two divisions run their regulatory departments differently. The division that I was in, everyone in the department worked on submissions to the FDA and to TUV, which is basically the FDA for European Union.. Certain individuals were assigned other regions that they were also responsible for that got submitted to the FDA and to Europe.. So the person on the project team made the two main submissions, and the territory people made the follow-ups. So I was responsible for about half of South East Asia and Australia, pretty much from the get-go. And then about midway through, I also picked up all of Central and South America.
I had a lot of countries. In addition to writing my own submissions for my project teams, IÂ communicated with various representatives in country, for each of those countries. We had St. Jude representatives in all of the countries, or over all those countries. Like in Central and South America we had one representative who was the in country person for all of them.
           Theyâd the representatives that I would work with in terms of my contact of things for that region. Some of the countries in South America I was working with were brand new countries for St. Jude to even market to, so they had nothing registered at all because we never sold product there. So I had to go through and find the most up to date information on these older products that weâve had all our other big main countries for a long time. The information on those older submissions isnât accurate anymore, so I had to research and find the proper information to be giving to these countries so that they could make their registrations. So it kind of varied from day to day, but it was mostly bouncing between different projects, so thereâs a lot of time management involved.. If thereâs a really busy week, you need to get this out ASAP, or this needs to be due, or the engineers need this for x, y, and z, and what things can maybe go on the backburner and wait till the end of the week or maybe till early next week and kind of balancing that whole process. The time management skills you learn in college really do come in handy!
I decided I want to become a BME because I viewed it as a way where I could help people without being a doctor. Like everybody always talks about they want to become a doctor or become a nurse because they want to help people. I wanted to help people, but like I said earlier, I didnât really think medical school was my thing, so I wanted to find a way that I could still get that feeling of helping people and that what I was doing was contributing to making somebodyâs life better. And I saw BME as a way to do that. Even before I really focused my interest more on the pure research side of things. If you work for a medical device company, youâre making products that make peopleâs lives better. The division I was a part of atSt. Jude, their spinal cord stimulation is via tortonic pain. These are people who have spent years in pain every day where it just hurts them to move and get out of bed, and everything they do they are in so much pain, that even narcotics canât cover it, itâs just miserable. These people go into so much depression, and they lose their jobs, they lose their families, they lose their friends, because they just canât function. So, to be able to seethe products that Iâm helping to get to market is doing to help these people, I can still see where Iâm really benefiting people. When I was working for the pharmaceuticals company, itâs kind of obvious how if you get a drug to market, it will really help those people that have the disease or the condition that the drug is for. I was working on Hepatitis B drugs for that summer, so I thought that creating a drug would make life easier for people with Hepatitis B. \ For MS, even though itâs a bit farther removed for this job, if we can figure out something significant with the process that somebody can make a drug for, that will be great forpeople that are suffering from MS. So, I really feel like no matter what area of the whole spectrum of things you can do with BME that you wind up in, itâs really easy to see how the things that BMEs do really help people.
           I was exposed to animal research initially here at Tech. Dr. Wilcoxâs lab does some animal work as well. So, even as an undergrad, it was something that I got exposure to. But even before seeing it first hand, itâs always been something that I wasnât opposed to, so long as it was done properly. Obviously, thereâs people out there who are gonna screw all the rules and regulations that are in place and do things that are horrible, and I would never able to be a part of that. But having worked with animals, you see all the regulations that are in place and all the extremely strenuous approvals you have to go through to even get anything through. And itâs very obvious that the procedures that are in place do a very good job of making sure that people donât abuse the power of working with animals. I very much viewed it as more of a necessary evil, as long as itâs done properly. But if itâs not done properly, itâs just evil. However, when you look at the things that have come out of animal research, there are things that I really donât think that we would have been able to learn and discover in any other way. So if you eliminate animal research in its entirety, you set us back so far. Even if you say well, âweâll just stop it hereâ, and everything weâve learned, great if you didnât like the way we did it. But, weâve never done it any way before; you just hold so much power over us.
Not everything can be done with just a sound model or a computer model. Not to give you accurate data at least. Look at drug trials where you start out with living cells. Then you move it up into mice, then you move it up into rats, then you move it up into rabbits, and then you move it up into humans. A lot of times, somewhere along the line it stops working. It might work great on the mice and rats, but then you get to rabbits and something goes wrong, and it doesnât work like it was before. Without animals, you wouldnât be able to get that process, and youâd just be like âOh, it works great on these cells, so letâs go inject it into some humanâ and something awful is going to happen. Again, it comes into the necessary evil kind of aspect to it. But once you start doing it, itâs something that you choose to get involved in. You see that the people that are involved with it really do care about the animals, and theyâre not just viewed as a waste, castoff by product. âItâs always just a little mouseâ. They donât like having to sacrifice the animals, but thereâs a respect that goes along with it. There are always the few exceptions of people that do awful things. But the majority, really respect them and weâre able to learn from animals information we wouldnât be able to learn without them.
I wouldnât say its normal to stand up for yourself all the time during board meetings. That time it was the 1st project where I worked on my own. I think a lot of what led to that incident was the other engineers trying to test me, test their boundaries, and see how far they could get me to go, and see if they could get me to give in. They were basically trying to see if I knew my stuff. A lot of times, the development folks really tried to skip the lineâŚthereâs a lot of gray area when it comes to the FDA. You could be debating between two different processes, and one could probably make a good argument that both processes could work. The development ones tends to take the more aggressive approach whereas regulatory affairs, at least from what I saw, tend to be a little more conservative. Once you tick the FDA off, it takes a while to get back into their good graces. Whether itâs trying to push things through a less strenuous review process then what they ultimately deserve or whether itâs submitting applications that donât really have complete information and they have to come back and ask you for additional information. Pretty much, there is no submission that goes through without some questions. If you are really not complete in what youâre presenting the FDA doesnât really like it. This is because the development folks donât work directly with the FDA. Theyâre not the ones that the FDA goes back to and goes tsk tsk tsk youâre not doing this right. A lot of times they tend to be a bit more aggressive because the faster you get a product to the market the faster you can start selling it. Then the faster the company starts making money from it. Itâs more that they come at it from a different angle and a different prospective. I think that instance was really more of them testing me and seeing how far they could go and seeing if I would back down or if I would stick to what I thought was the proper method. If the VP tells them that what Iâm telling them is right then it makes it a little bit harder for them to question me. If I know what Iâm doing versus if they go over my head and the VP agrees with them versus what Iâm saying then I lose a lot of credibility. I didnât love the fact that they went over my head. It frustrated me a little bit at the time because I felt like I was being undermined but ultimately I think it ended up working out for the best. They never did it again after that project, so I think it was their way of testing me. Maybe a little bit of hazing for the newbie.  Â
I believe the research I did on Southeast Asia, Australia, and Central America helped be with my global perspective. Ultimately while I was given Southeast Asia in the first place is because I had experience with Southeast Asia already. I couldnât speak Chinese or Thai or Japanese or any of the sorts but I at least had experience working with people in that territory and working with the language barrier. I spent the summer with a bunch of people where English wasnât their first language and even all the ones that could speak it, it was a lot more broken than fluent. Being able to work with the language barrier is the reason I think they put me in that position. I definitely think it helps because in these countries people are more fluent in English than a person I would meet down the street in Singapore. Even if youâre not fluent think about the language and words and terminology in whatever language it is that you studied. Itâs going to be a lot more basic words. Itâs not going to be the high up technical information. A lot of times you need to explain things and present things in a different way to the person in that country to help them understand it because theyâre not going to know all of the advance terminology in English. The depth of terminology is fine, if you could speak Chinese to them, but I canât speak Chinese. Sometimes, they would come back with a question and I would try to explain it to them but you can tell that some thing was not clicking. Therefore, you have to be able to understand that sometimes you have to approach it in a different way because of that language barrier.Â
           In college I wish I could have gotten into a research job, whether it was in the industry or academic, right out of school versus spending the two and a half years in the business side of the industry. Obviously, there are different aspects of industry. Thereâs a part of me that wish I would have started in research because I knew when I was graduating that thatâs what I would have preferred. But, on the flip side I gained a lot of great experience at St. Jude and I was able to cover a lot of areas that I donât think I would have gotten to if I was strictly in research. For example, regulatory affairs is a type of technical writing and itâs basically every submission we make to every agency. And yeah you get a little bit out of that at Tech. I think Tech does a really good job with that. But itâs somewhat on the end of the same level if thatâs what youâre doing is one of the components of your job 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. So I think that experience, now that Iâm back in research, is going to be beneficial when it comes to writing papers and writing graphs because thatâs technical writing. Plus, I was able to do some really neat things such as the training program in California where I got to spend 10 months with the division out there and I had never been to California until I started that. I got to spend 9 months living outside of Los Angeles in the suburbs and I spent another month living outside the bay area and got to travel and do a lot of things out there that I probably would not have got if I was in the research industry unless I was in California. Because I was working with Southeast Asia as one of my territories, they held a regulatory affairs conference that all the representatives for Southeast Asia from all four divisions as well as the in-country representatives met in Malaysia for a four day conference and since I was a representative for southeast Asia for my division I got to go, so i do think that would be some very good experiences. That was a great company and I worked with great people but the job was something I could see myself doing long term. I tend to have the belief that I donât regret much that I do in life so long and itâs where I like where Iâm ultimately at. Even if I did something a different way, then would I have ended up in the same place I am now? I tend to view life as things happen for a reason and it ultimately works out the way itâs supposed to. I have been ultimately been able to the research that I wanted to do, but I got some great experiences in a different area along the way that potentially puts me in a better position for research or maybe not. Iâll never know, but things have worked out in a way that I like so it makes it hard to say that I regret a choice that happened along the way.
           Transitioning from college to the first job was definitely actively looking because I just graduated and needed to make money. I didnât start actively looking until the end of my senior year, because at the very end of junior year I was still deciding in my mind whether I wanted to go to grad school or if I wanted to get a job. And it was pretty late in junior year, maybe a little early into senior year that I ultimately decided in my head that I was a bit burn out of school and that I needed a break and needed to do something different. Maybe I would go back in the future and get another degree, but for now I was ready to be done. So, I definitely started actively looking, applied for over a 100 jobs. It was a really good thing that I planned. I planned my schedules throughout college so that throughout my senior year I took 14 hours my 1st semester and 12 hours my last semester. Of those 12 hours, I had Senior Design, which obviously you canât avoid, I had my economics requirement, I had my history requirement, and I had Psychology 1101. I basically frontloaded my schedule so that by the end of senior year, I didnât have any hardcore taxing classes, other than senior design.
           That was kind of an added benefit to it, that I really didnât really think about when I started frontloading my schedule and making my second semester of senior year really light. My thought was I thought Senior Design was a huge timesuck, and I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to focus on senior design and do what I needed to do for that without it detracting from a 4000 level BME class or something like that. I wanted to try and getâand I had a couple of those 1st semester of senior year than 2nd semester of senior design is definitely a lot more time requiring than 1st semester of senior design. But, an added benefit that I ended up having with that was that it did give me a lot more time to focus on the job search, which ended up being necessary because of the way the economy was. So it ended up being a gratuitous accident, I guess you could say, because I didnât think about that and how it might play out at the time, but it ended up working out really well. I actually got my job offer the day before graduation. My parents were in town, and we were out playing golf with my then boyfriend. I was in the middle of the golf course, and I knew I was waiting on a phone call, so even though I was on a golf course I still had my phone on. And I heard my phone ringing, and I went off to the side of the, I donât remember if we were on the green or the fairway, I went off to the side, where everyone else was playing, and I answered this phone call, and got the offer, and was literally jumping up and down on the golf course, because I was freaking out that I was going to graduate without a jobâa lot of people are graduating without jobsâ I wouldnât have been in a tiny minorityâŚit was rough. I was very excited, it was a great graduation present, to say the least. But, looking at this job at Emory, I was again actively researching, and I guess the biggest reason that I had to end up actively searching was because I was completely changing career paths. I was going from a regulatory affairs office position at a medical device company and wanting to get back in research, either in academia or in pharmaceuticals. Totally different. So, when youâre looking to make that big of a change, opportunities arenât as much going to fall in your lap as much as you are in your right career path and doing what you want to do, working your way up a ladder. Obviously still, sometimes with that, you still have to actively search and actively make a change for yourself. But there are other times with things like that that opportunities fall into your lap. Even when I was in regulatory affairs, I had recruiters that would call, every month or two, that would call about different regulatory affairs positions in different companies in different cities. If regulatory affairs was where I saw myself staying, I definitely would have had the ability to advance myself and move up the ladder, and change areas and change companies without having to actively seek it out. But, with wanting to make as big of a switch with what I was doing by getting back into lab, I had to actively seek that out. In terms of the day to day life of transition, obviously, itâs very different from being in college, and having classes, and having a varied structure from day to day and breaks here and there where you have class for a couple of hours and where you donât for 3, to going to working an 8 to 5, and working a 40+ hour week. Iâve been lucky in that both of my jobs have been relatively normal hours. You get the occasionally crazy week where you got a lot going on and putting in extra hours, because I was working with some countries around the world, I had the occasional teleconference that was later in the evening, where I had to stick around later, or call in after I got home from work and was relaxing for a few hours or things like that. But that wasnât the norm, and I wasnât in a crazy position where they expect you to work 65 hour weeks or anything like that. Thatâs just not me. Iâve always been of the mentality that I work to live, not live to work. When I enjoy what Iâm doing. If I were to show up at eight a.m. in my lab, and we share lab space with three different  professors, so thereâs probably  fifteen people that work in our big open lab space.
      In regards to a going back to school, I donât see myself as becoming a professor. Even if I did decide to go back to school I donât see myself going quite that far. Honestly, at this point if I went back to school it would probably be for a masterâs in probably immunology. The lab Iâm in now, thereâs a lot of immunology work. Which is kind of one thing that Iâve found Iâm lacking a little bit, being in this lab, because a BME degree really doesnât give you much in the way of an immunology background. So Iâve been having to learn things as I go when it comes to the more technical immunology information. My professorâs actually going to have me audit the senior level immunology course in the spring, just to kind of catch up on the stuff that BME didnât cover, that, one of the more pure sciences degree might have. But I think I would more stick to the masters level, which can help me move up within a lab, to maybe being more of a lab manager underneath the professor whoâs actually the person running the lab. Kind of being able to be in a position where I can mentor people below me in a lab position. Versus right now, I donât have anybody reporting to me. So I think that would be one thing that would be really nice to work toward in the future and kind of put myself in the position for.
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 Nick: To start off what exactly was your job title at Saint Jude Hospital
Kim: I was a regulatory affairs associate
Nick: What I got form the panel was that you worked a lot with patents
Kim: I wasnât so much on the patents side they actually have people with law degrees do the real patent work but the regulatory affairs pretty much paves the way between the company and the FDA, along with the similar groups like FDA for all the other countries around the world. They all have their own version. So basically once the product is developed and they do all the RND and all the testing, then we are the ones that take all that information and put it together to present to the FDA so they can approve the product and it can go into the market. This is the last line of defense before a product can be sold
Nick: Is that what you saw yourself doing or is this how it played out when you got into the industry?
Kim: Itâs kind of just how it played out. I graduate in May of 09, which was the bottom of the bottom of the economy fall out. Made job searching very interesting, I really wanted to, my ideal was to get into a lab research job, which I have now at Emory, but with the economy fallout getting funding for lab research was horrid, so labs were not hiring because they couldnât get funding so they couldnât bring in new people, so I had to take a different direction at least for the short term, so I was applying for a variety of things from RND jobs to the field Engineer jobs kind of similar to what Angela started out doing, or you work for a medical device company where you help with the implants or help with the programming. To the Regulatory affairs job, I was even looking at medical device sales, I was basically applying to a little bit of everything, but I found it all interesting because the job market was a little rough so this kind of just what ended up working out and it came to a job offer at Saint Jude Medical which is a really great company so I was really excited to get my foot into a really good place even with a tough economy and being right out of school.
Nick: Did you always want to go into the industry or did you think about going pre-med?
Kim: I actually graduated with a pre-med degree, I was actually a BME pre-med, but I never seriously thought about medical school I more just ended up being pre-med because I didnât want to cut the option out, unless they changed the curriculum at all it only takes 2 or 3 additional classes from the standard BME degree to be pre-med, and if you want to go to med school you have to be pre-med, so I figured it would be worth it to take the couple of extra classes so I would have that option open to me should I decide later down the line that It was something I wanted to do versus deciding junior or senior year and be like dang it I have to make up these classes that I could have just taken along the way so that I could go apply to med school next year, so I was pre-med, the options was there but it was never seriously considered I also thought for awhile about going to get my PhD-D but by the time I graduate I was ready for a break from school for a little bit I may go back and get a masters or PhD at some point but I ready to do something different and get a break from school after a lot of years of doing it.
Nick: What are you doing for you current job at Emory.
Kim: For my current job I am a research specialist I work in a lab in the physiology depart at Emory and my lab focuses on multiple sclerosis more specifically trying to understand the implication process and what factors in mechanisms are involved in the whole implication process behind MS.
Nick: So is it kind of like a new research, are you guys doing things that people have never done before?
Kim: Yea it is a brand new research, the lab I am in is a brand new lab and its less than a year old at this point, the professor recently finished his post-doc up at Stanford and took up this job Emory. This is his first professor position, this is his first lab that he is actually the head of and we are really small its just myself, him, and one other research specialist, so I really get to be hands on and get to be like fully involve in everything and knowing ever aspect versus having my own segment of the project, a lot of the time the bigger labs you get your own segment of the project, but outside of like monthly lab meeting you donât so much what the other segments are doing, when you are only a three person lab you know what everyone is doing which is nice, so basically we are trying, the simplified version would be we are trying to understand the mechanism and if we can figure out the mechanism then the big drug company can take what we learn about the mechanism and try and make a drug to target, so my lab is trying to more do just the base understand of the process and understanding whatâs going on, not so much trying to develop a drug or develop a treatment.
Nick: Growing up did you always want to become an engineer? What was your plan?
Kim: I would consider myself more of a scientist which is probably why I was drawn a lot more to a lab research, than being an engineer, and I think if BME didnât exist I wouldnât have been an engineering major I would have been a Biology major or biochemistry major so I definitely swing a lot more towards that side but I found out about BME when I probably in 9th grade and really latch onto it and I thought it was really cool so I obviously always love science but I always like math so I liked the fat the it was a major that incorporated both of those tings , I got all the sciences from the biology, physiology, chemistry, your organic chemistry I got all of that but then also get the more problem solving mathematically analytical side of things that you donât get as much in a hard science, so that really what kind of of drew me to it but Iâm definitely more of a science person than an engineering person, I would never have considered being an ME or IE or anything of that sort.
Nick: When you were an undergrad what was your plan you talked about how you took the pre-med classes but didnât really want to go into medical school but did you do research and internships?
Kim: I did a lot of research and internships; I worked in Doctor Lopaka lab for all four years of undergrad, I honestly donât know why I was in that lab, it was one of those that I knew I wanted to get involve in research so early on in my freshman year I started pulling the different professors in BME and looking at what they did in their labs, and I found two or three of them that I thought had really interesting research so I emailed them saying hey I think what you are doing in your lab is really interesting, would you mind if we sat down and talked about it for 30 or 40 minutes, just trying to make it so that the would recognize me so I could come back a year later and try to be in their lab, that was my mental plan. When I met with Doctor Lopaka she offered me a spot in her lab after we finished talking, I was like huh okie, I didnât think I could do this yet, Iâm just a freshman I havenât even taken a BME course yet, and now your goanna let me work in your lab okie! So it worked out to my advantage I guess that I could get in so early because I was able to get in the one that I was consistently for all of school but then I spent summer freshman year went home and didnât do anything interesting. I worked at a Cold Stone and answered telephones at my high school, cause when you work two years and working 75 hours so that was great. But then summer my sophomore year I went to Singapore and spent three months working at a lab at the National university of Singapore, again just kind of one of those, I came in with enough AP credit that fulfilled all the Humanities electives and what not and unless it ahs changed since I graduated there is no study abroad program that covers any kind of BME credits, I know some of the other Engineering majors have study abroad programs that are to design for upper classman that cover their core classes so that they take advantage something other than humanities but BME does not have that at least they didnât but maybe they do know, so I didnât really want to do your standard Oxford or whatever where you would take a bunch of humanities electives that werenât going to do anything because my humanities were already fulfilled it seemed a little bit of a waste, so I went to the department and asked them if they had any contacts to do research abroad, they said they really didnât know anything but if you could get something set up you can still apply for the various study abroad scholarships to help pay for it and I was like awesome. So I was, I donât remember how I came up by it, I think I was looking at various schools that Tech BME department had various relationships with some capacity, in terms of finding a place that I could go that would actually know Georgia Tech and know its program and therefore would be willing to let me come and I kind of went through places that seemed like cool places to go, so I kind of did what I did here at Tech and went through the professors information online and found a couple that were doing research that was really interesting and emailed them like I want to come work in your lab for this summer and Ill do it for free, I just need someone that will take me, so actually both professors that I emailed said I could come and that they couldnât pay me but if I could get myself there that I was welcome to wok in their lab 40 hours a week and they would show me the ropes so I spend three months over there working in a lab which was a lot of fun, it was very different from studying abroad program in that I got be over there all by myself and I wasnât surrounded by a bunch of Georgia Tech kids their all speaking English their all hanging out together and their all having the same experiences and similar backgrounds. I went over there living in the student hostile thatâs full of a bunch of people that speak tons of different languages, most of them speak very little English and if they do its very broke. I have to find my way around the city on public transport because I do not get to live in dorms on campus because Iâm not a student. Iâm just working. So it definitely made it for a very different experience than a normal study abroad. I think it was really good to be independent and be on my own for three months in a totally foreign place. I got to do a lot of traveling that you would be able to do with any study abroad program too which was a big thing that I wanted to get out of it, I always loved to travel so I always knew I wanted to do something abroad and have that experience so it worked out well. The summer after junior year I stayed domestic and I wanted to see the other side of things, everything I had done at that point was research at the university. Â I wanted to stick with the whole research thing but look into research in the industry so I worked at a pharmaceutical company called Guilets Sciences. I worked there at their North Carolina location, which actually no longer exist. They closed it since I worked there but their based out of the Bay area, is where their main location is and I think they have another location in the Denver area, I worked at the now nonexistent North Carolina location and did pharmaceutical research industry for that summer just to kind of get a different side of the coin and actually I really enjoyed the industry research as well. Before I got the unfortunate news that no one was hiring research when I graduated I was very opened to both industry research and academic research and I honestly still would be, when I was applying for jobs and ultimately land this job at Emory I was looking for both Industry and academic research. I just wanted to be more that side than the development of a medical device or the testing of a product kind of deal. Kind of a different swing. I kept myself busy.
Nick: How have you overcome any Biomedical obstacles that the industry is not yet solved, like I guess in your lab you are doing things that have not been solved so there are obstacles everyday, so could you give me some examples of that, its kind of an interesting question.
Kim: Yea, kind of a tricky one. I would say that it gets to the point, that regulatory affairs I donât feel like we had those kind of obstacles as much because obviously year it could be a totally new product but the FDA already has it guidelines about how you approach each different kind of ting and they pretty much covered their bases in that each type of thing falls somewhere in their guide line. Sometimes it gets a little grey whether it falls into area A or area B. But, thereâs not like any brand new, oh my god thereâs this something that the FDA never thought to consider they pretty well covered their bases. But, as for research, I wouldnât even say its so much big picture things but just the day to day, well not day to day, there werenât things going wrong day to day but the week to week and the month to month where you spend multiple weeks writing a long term experiment and it doesnât work or you ran it once and it works great and your try and you go back to try and repeat your results and it doesnât work. See you run into the problem solving and trying to figure out what went wrong; like I know we one we had to do a lot of animal work, we were using a mouse model to study MS. So we would do a lot of malty week animal experiments and we had one that it work great and we got results, and we ran it again, and it absolutely failed. The results didnât even make sense, even with the controls that should have worked one way, like without problem, werenât working the way they should have. And we were sitting there trying to figure out, did we use a different lott number on various reagents? Did the animal facility people feed the mice and clean out the cages? Did somebody accidentally swap the cage cards on our cages in the middle of the experiment when they were cleaning the cages and giving food, so that the mice we were seeing were the controls, or maybe they werenât the controls if the cage cards got swapped? Weâre just trying to figure out what mightâve gone wrong to explain what we were seeing. Sometimes it happens on smaller scales, sometimes on bigger scales, where the big experiment crashes and burns, but you definitely have a lot of problem solving, trying to figure out where things gone wrong. Luckily, they donât go wrong too often, but when they do. The joys of research
Nick- What does the average day look like in the life of a BME? Well I would say more in the St. Jude Medical area.
Kim-Well, at least with my job, I worked a pretty standard 8 to 5 position. I worked in an office park, a big building that housed all the different departments, and everybody pretty much came in at 8, worked till 5. Everyday, I got to live in a cubicle, and I really donât like cubicles, that further emphasized that I prefer working more in a lab environment than a cube environment, but working in industry, if youâre going to be an industry engineer, that cube environment tends to come with the territory. So I guess, itâs a good thing to know. But, there was a lot of meetings, that was the biggest thing. You kind of alternated your day between writing and researching information and meetings. I was usually on from 3 to 6 different project teams at any given time. Some of them for brand new products, some of them for changes for existing products, and I was the regulatory affairs representative for each of those teams. On any given day, a couple of your teams might have a meeting, whether itâs a full team meeting with the product management and with the R & D engineers and with the marketing folks and with the manufacturing folks and with us, or maybe just a smaller meeting with the couple of R & D folks and me because they want to run a couple of ideas by regulatory affairs. So, sometimes it varied in terms of what types of meetings weâd get. And between the meetings I would work on writing the submissions and prepping all the information for projects that were further on in the timeline that were getting closer to submission, versus the projects that were early on and not nearly near submission. Some of the projects were only a couple months long if it was a quick small change. Some of the other projects could last a couple years if itâs for a brand new product that weâve never had anything similar to it before, or if itâs a completely new technology. Youâve got a lot of variability in the types of projects that you could work on. And with my position, at least with my department, obviously every companyâs going to run it a little differently, and I even saw from my training in one division versus actually working in the division that hired me, that the two divisions run their regulatory departments differently. The division that I was in, everyone in the department worked on submissions to the FDA and to TUV, which is basically the FDA for European Union. Everyone worked in both of those territories. And then, certain individuals were assigned other regions that they were also responsible for, to where after got submitted to the FDA and to Europe, whether you were actually on the project team or not, you were responsible for making the submission to your various territories. So the person on the project team made the two main submissions, and the territory people made the follow-ups. So I was responsible for about half of South East Asia and Australia, pretty much from the get-go. And then about midway through, I also picked up all of Central and South America.
Nick-Youâre responsible for a big region.
Kim- I had a lot of countries. In addition to writing my own submissions for my project teams, I would be communicating with various representatives in country, for each of those countries. We had St. Jude representatives who were in all of the countries, or over all those countries. Like in Central and South America we had one representative who was the in country person for all of them. So they kind of arenât in each country, but you get the idea-
Nick- Representative.
Kim-Theyâre the representative that I would work with in terms of my contact of things for that region. Iâd be communicating with them, and theyâre on a totally different timeline than the main projects. Like some of the countries in South America when I was working with them were brand new countries for St. Jude to even market to, so they had but nothing registered at all, because we never sold product there. So Iâm having to go through and find the most up to date information on these older products that weâve had in the US, that we had in Europe, that weâve had in all our other big main countries for a long time, and even the information on those older submissions isnât accurate anymore, because things have been changed, things have been updated, so I had to research and find the proper information to be giving to these countries so that they could make their registrations. So it kind of varied from day to day, but it was mostly bouncing between your different projects, so thereâs a lot of time management involved, and keeping up on the status of everything youâre working on, and kind of knowing what things take priority on a certain week. If thereâs a really busy week, you need to get this out ASAP, or this needs to be due, or the engineers need this for x, y, and z, and what things can maybe go on the backburner and wait till the end of the week or maybe till early next week and kind of balancing that whole process. The time management skills you learn in college really do come in handy!
Nick- Definitely need them here. What would you consider your purpose in becoming a BME? Why did you want to be a BME?
Kim- Youâre getting all philosophical on me here! I guess I viewed it as a way where I could help people without being a doctor. Like everybody always talks about they want to become a doctor or become a nurse because they want to help people. And, I wanted to help people, but like I said earlier, I didnât really think medical school was my thing, so I wanted to find a way that I could still get that feeling of helping people and that what I was doing was contributing to making somebodyâs life better, without being a doctor. And I kinda saw BME as a way to do that. Even before I really focused my interest more on the pure research side of things. If you work for a medical device company, youâre making products that make peoples lives better. The division I was at at St. Jude, their spinal cord stimulation is via tortonic pain. So these are people who have spent years in pain every day where it just hurts them to move and get out of bed, and everything they do they are in so much pain, that even narcotics cant cover it cant do anything, its just miserable. These people go into so much depression, and they lose their jobs, and they lose their families, and they lose their friends, because they just canât function. So, to be able to see, you know, what the products that Iâm helping to get to market in regulatory affairs is doing to help these people, you can still see where youâre really benefiting people. Even, the same thing with the pure research, when I was working for the pharmaceuticals company, itâs kind of obvious how if you get a drug to market, its gonna really help those people that have the disease or the condition that the drug is for. I was working on Hepatitis B drugs for that summer, so again, I was like, âNobody wants Hepatitis B. You can have a drug that makes your life better if you happen to have Hepatitis B, thatâs a good thing.â For MS, even though itâs a bit farther removed for this job, if we figure out something really important with the process that somebody can make a drug for, thatâs huge for people that are suffering from MS. So, I really feel like no matter what area of the whole spectrum of things you can do with BME that you wind up in, its really easy to see how the things that BMEs do really do help people. Even if itâs not as direct as, âIâm a doctor and Iâm gonna do open heart surgery on you and make your heart better, its still very obvious where the ties and the connections are.
Nick- And sometimes it can be more important than open heart surgery, just because you think like a large group of people-
Kim- Yeah exactly. If you discover or you invent or develop something thatâs really a big deal, it can affect a ton, way more people than any single doctor can. So, all depends on how you look at it.
Nick- Yeah, well um I donât really have any more questions, I donât know if you guys have anythingâ
Stetson- I came up with a few, if you donât mind. You were talking about with the mice and I was wondering if you ever questioned the ethics about working with animals or you ever in your working in lab sciences, have you ever have to question, I donât know, if what you were doing was right
Kim- I was actually exposed to animal research initially here at Tech, Dr. Wilcoxâs lab does some animal work as well. So, even as an undergrad, it was something that I got exposure to. But really even before seeing it first hand, itâs always been something that I wasnât opposed to, so long as it was done properly. Obviously, thereâs people out there who are gonna screw all the rules and regulations that are in place and do things that are horrible, and I would never able to be a part of that. But having worked with animals, you see all the regulations that are in place and all the extremely strenuous approvals you have to go through to even get anything through. And itâs very obvious that the procedures that are in place do a very good job of making sure that people donât abuse the power of working with animals. I very much viewed it as more of a necessary evil, you could say , again as long as itâs done properly. But if itâs not done properly, itâs just evil. Um, but when you look at the things that have come out of animal research, there are things that I really donât think that we would have been able to learn and discover any other way. So if you eliminate animal research in its entirety, you set us back so far.
Stetson- Right
Kim- Even if you say well, âweâll just stop it hereâ, and everything weâve learned, great, if you didnât like the way we did it, but, great, but weâve never done it any way before, you just hold so much power over us. Not everything can be done with just a sound model or a computer model. At least not to give you accurate data. Even look at how many drug trials and you start out with living cells. Then you move it up into mice, then you move it up into rats, then you move it up into rabbits, then you move it up into humans. A lot of times, somewhere along the line it stops working. Like it might work great for your mice and rats, then you get to rabbits and something goes wrong, and it doesnât work like it was before. And without animals, you wouldnât be able to get that process, and youâd just be like âOh, it works great on these cells, so letâs go inject it into some humanâ and something awfulâs gonna happen. And again, it comes into the necessary evil kind of aspect to it. But once you start doing it, itâs something that you choose to get involved in. You see that the people that are involved with it really do care about the animals, and theyâre not just viewed as like a waste, castoff by product. âItâs always just a little mouseâ. They donât like having to sacrifice the animals, but thereâs a respect that comes along with it, in that the researchers that work with animals, at least the majority, like I said. Thereâs always the exceptions that do awful things. But the majority, we really respect them and what weâre able to learn from them that we wouldnât able to do without them.
Stetson- In the board, you mentioned you had to stick to your guns when you were submitting that timeline, and people tried to go over you, and you had to tell them it had to go over a longer period of time. Is that the only example, I donât know, is it normal for you to have to stick to your guns and go with your gut feeling over what has been told to you.
Kim- I wouldnât say its normal. That instance, I think, like I said that was the 1st project where I worked on my own. So I think a lot of what led to that incident was the other engineers trying to test me, test their boundaries and see how far they could get me to go and see if they could get me to give in. And basically try to see if I knew my stuff. Because a lot of times, the development folks really try to skirt the lineâŚthereâs a lot of gray area when it comes to the FDA. So you could be debating between two different processes, and one could probably make a good argument that both ones could work. And the development ones likes to take the more aggressive approach whereas regulatory affairs, at least from what I saw, tend to be a little more conservative. Once you tick the FDA off, it takes a while to get back into their good graces. Whether itâs trying to push things through a less strenuous review process then what they ultimately deserve and the FDA having to come back and chastise you and say no you can't do it this way. You should know better. Submit it this way. Or whether it's submitting applications that don't really have complete information and they're having to come back and ask you for additional things and ask you to explain things. Pretty much no submission goes through without some questions. If you are really not complete in what you're presenting the FDA doesn't really like it. Because the development folks don't work directly with the FDA, theyâre not the ones that the FDA goes back to and goes tsk tsk tsk you're not doing this right. A lot of times they tend to be a bit more aggressive because obviously the faster you get a product to market the faster you can start selling it, the faster the company starts making money from it. It's more that they come at it from a different angle and a different prospective. I think that instance was really more of them testing me and seeing how far they could go and seeing if I would back down or if I would stick to what I thought was the proper method. And I think the going over my head was more to test my knowledge. If the VP tells them that what I'm telling them is right then it makes it a little bit harder for them to question if I know what I'm doing versus if they go over my head and the VP agrees with them versus what I'm saying then I lose a lot of credibility. I didnât love the fact that they went over my head. It frustrated me a little bit at the time because I felt like I was being undermined but ultimately I think it ended up working out for the best and they never did it again after that project so I think it was their way of testing me, maybe a little bit of hazing for the newbie.  Â
Nick: When you were working you said you were responsible for Southeast Asia, Australia, and Central America. Do you think the research you did was set up for your global perspective? Anything you gained from that actually got you into that or the fact that it benefitted you?Â
Kim: I do think it helped. Ultimately while I was given Southeast Asia in the first place is because I had experience with Southeast Asia. Yeah I can't speak Chinese or Thai or Japanese or any of the sort but I at least had experience working with people in that territory and working with the language barrier. I spent the summer with a bunch of people where English wasn't their first language and even all the ones that could speak it, it was a lot more broken than fluent. So being able to work with the language barrier is the reason I think they put me in that position. I definitely think it helps because these in country people are more fluent in English then a person I'd meet down the street in Singapore. Are any of you fluent in any language other than English.Â
Nick: noÂ
Kim: Even if you're not fluent think about the language and words and terminology and whatever language it is that you studied. It's going to be a lot more basic common things. It's not going to be the high up, technical information. A lot of times you need to explain things and present things in a different way to the in country to help them understand it because they're not going to know all of the higher terminology in English. The depth of terminology is fine if you could speak Chinese to them but I can't speak Chinese. Sometimes they would come back with a question and I would try to explain it to them but you can tell that some thing is not clicking. So you have to be able to understand that sometimes you have to approach it in a different way because of that language barrier.Â
Nick: Looking back from where you are now to your college career is there anything you wish you would have done or are you completely satisfied?Â
Kim: I wish I could have gotten into a research job whether it was in the industry or academic right out of school versus spend the 2 and a half years in the more non research side of industry. Obviously there are different aspects of industry. There's a part of me that wish I would have started in research because I knew when I was graduating that that's what I would have preferred but on the flip side I was able to have a lot of great experiences at St. Jude and I was able to cover a lot of areas that I don't think I would have gotten if I was strictly in research. Like regulatory affairs is a to of technical writing and it's basically every submission we make to every agency. And yeah you get a little bit out of that at Tech. I think Tech does a really good job with that. But it's somewhat on the end of the same level if that's what youâre doing is one of the components of your job 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year. So I think that experience, now that Iâm back in research, is going to be beneficial when it comes to writing papers and writing graphs because that's technical writing so I was able to gain a lot of experience with that. Plus I was able to do some really neat things like I had that training program in California where I got to spend 10 months with the division out there and I had never been to California until I started that. I got to spend 9 months living outside of LA in the suburbs and I spent another month living outside the bay area and got to travel and do a lot of things out there that I probably would not have got if I was in the research industry unless I was in California. Because I was working with Southeast Asia as one of my territories they held a regulatory affairs conference that all the representatives for southeast Asia from all 4 divisions as well as the in country representatives met in Malaysia for a 4 day conference and since I was a representative for southeast Asia for my division I got to go so i do think that would be some very good experiences. That was a great company and I worked with great people but the job was something I could see myself doing long term. I tend to have the believe that I don't regret much that I do in life so long and itâs where I like where Iâm ultimately at. Because even if I did something a different way, then would I have ended up in the same place I am now? I tend to view life as, things happen for a reason, and it ultimately works out the way itâs supposed to. I have been ultimately been able to the research that I wanted to do, but I got some great experiences in a different area along the way that maybe potentially puts me in a better position for research, maybe not. Iâll never know, but things have worked out in a way that I like so it makes hard to say that I regret a choice that happened along the way. Do you know what I mean?
Kaylee- I have one more question. You kind of already talked about it, but I was gonna ask about the transition between college and your first job, and your first job and your job right now. Were you actively looking?
Kim- Transitioning from college to the first job was definitely actively looking because I just graduated and needed to make money. I didnât start actively looking until the end of my senior year, because at the very end of junior year, I was still deciding in my mind whether I wanted to go to grad school right then and there or if I wanted to get a job. And it was pretty late in junior year, maybe a little early into senior year that I ultimately decided in my head that I was a bit burn out of school and that I needed a break and needed to do something different. Maybe I would go back in the future and get another degree, but for now I was ready to be done. So, I definitely started actively looking, applied for over a 100 jobs â yay bad economy- I really hope that yâall donât have to do that when you graduate, because that was awful. It was a really good thing that I planned-hereâs something that I definitely didnât regret. I planned my schedules throughout college so that throughout my senior year I took 14 hours my 1st semester and 12 hours my last semester. Of those 12 hours, I had Senior Design, which obviously you canât avoid, I had my economics requirement, I had my history requirement, and I had Psychology 1101. I basically frontloaded my schedule so that by the end of senior year, I didnât have any hardcore taxing classes, other than senior design.
Stetson- Of course it would be possible for you to go look out for jobs with an easier schedule.
Kim- Yeah, and that was kind of an added benefit to it, that I really didnât really think about when I started frontloading my schedule and making my second semester of senior year really light. My thought was I thought Senior Design was a huge timesuck, and I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to focus on senior design and do what I needed to do for that without it detracting from a 4000 level BME class or something like that. I wanted to try and getâand I had a couple of those 1st semester of senior year than 2nd semester of senior design is definitely a lot more time requiring than 1st semester of senior design. But, an added benefit that I ended up having with that was that it did give me a lot more time to focus on the job search, which ended up being necessary because of the way the economy was. So it ended up being a gratuitous accident, I guess you could say, because I didnât think about that and how it might play out at the time, but it ended up working out really well. I actually got my job offer the day before graduation. My parents were in town, and we were out playing golf with my then boyfriend. I was in the middle of the golf course, and I knew I was waiting on a phone call, so even though I was on a golf course I still had my phone on. And I heard my phone ringing, and I went off to the side of the, I donât remember if we were on the green or the fairway, I went off to the side, where everyone else was playing, and I answered this phone call, and got the offer, and was literally jumping up and down on the golf course, because I was freaking out that I was going to graduate without a jobâa lot of people are graduating without jobs-- I wouldnât have been in a tiny minorityâŚit was rough. I was very excited, it was a great graduation present, to say the least. But, looking at this job at Emory, I was again actively researching, and I guess the biggest reason that I had to end up actively searching was because I was completely changing career paths. I was going from a regulatory affairs office position at a medical device company and wanting to get back in research, either in academia or in pharmaceuticals. Totally different. So, when youâre looking to make that big of a change, opportunities arenât as much going to fall in your lap as much as you are in your right career path and doing what you want to do, working your way up a ladder. Obviously still, sometimes with that, you still have to actively search and actively make a change for yourself. But there are other times with things like that that opportunities fall into your lap. Even when I was in regulatory affairs, I had recruiters that would call, every month or two, that would call about different regulatory affairs positions in different companies in different cities. If regulatory affairs was where I saw myself staying, I definitely would have had the ability to advance myself and move up the ladder, and change areas and change companies without having to actively seek it out. But, with wanting to make as big of a switch with what I was doing by getting back into lab, I had to actively seek that out. In terms of the day to day life of transition, obviously, itâs very different from being in college, and having classes, and having a varied structure from day to day and breaks here and there where you have class for a couple of hours and where you donât for 3, to going to working an 8 to 5, and working a 40+ hour week. Iâve been lucky in that both of my jobs have been relatively normal hours. You get the occasionally crazy week where you got a lot going on and putting in extra hours, because I was working with some countries around the world, I had the occasional teleconference that was later in the evening, where I had to stick around later, or call in after I got home from work and was relaxing for a few hours or things like that. But that wasnât the norm, and I wasnât in a crazy position where they expect you to work 65 hour weeks or anything like that. Iâm very big on having a work/life balance, and I could never see myself in a position where Iâm expected to work 65+ hours a week. Thatâs just not me. Iâve always been of the mentality that I work to live, not live to work. When I enjoy what Iâm dying
Kim: âItâs a very much more laid back pace than industry is, and, if I were to show up at eight a.m. in my lab, and we share lab space with three different  professors, so thereâs probably, god, between three professors, probably fifteen people that work in our big open lab space. If I showed up at eight, Iâd be the first one there. And, most people really donât start to trickle in until sometime between nine and nine forty-five. On the flipside, you have to stay a little later. I tend to work about nine, nine fifteen to five forty-five, six. But, so I guess it comes with these tradeoffs. But that kind of a schedule works really well for me, not being a morning person. Iâd much rather sleep in an extra hour and stay an extra hour, leaving at six is a lot better than leaving at five. Especially when I have to go all the way up 85.
Moen: âYou basically wind up getting there the same time anyway.â
Moyer: âPretty much, at least sometimes it feels like it. God, one thing I didnât miss being away from Atlanta was the traffic. Not that LA was much better. LA was worse, actually. Dallas wasnât bad. I was pleasantly surprised. Dallas was a lot like Atlanta, in most ways. They are very similar cities. But the traffic was nowhere near as bad. Their highway system is just so much better. Theyâve got a couple different perimeters, theyâve got multiple highways that go into downtown, so itâs not like the connector where everyoneâs getting onto one road, and it gets backed up like crazy. It was just a much better setup, which was nice to have for a couple years, but I love being back in Atlanta, donât get me wrong, but I certainly didnât miss the traffic while I was gone.â
Nick: âHaha, thatâs good but ummâŚâ
Kim: âLAâs traffic though, I donât think you could pay me to live in LA long term. Some people love it. You hear everybody talk âOh God, Southern California, so amazing, LA, San Diego.â Iâm like, God it wasnât all it was cracked up to be in my book, hahaha. I loved being thirty minutes from the beach. I didnât love random stop and go sitting in a parking lot on the highway traffic at eleven p.m. on a Sunday and two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Because, at least, like, Atlantaâs itâs, you know when itâs going to be bad. Unless thereâs a wreck or something, itâs very predictable. Itâs going to be bad during normal rush hour in the morning, and in the evening. And outside of that itâs really not that bad. LAâs [traffic] was just totally unpredictable. Youâd hit crazy, random, awful, traffic for no reason, at random times of day. So you pretty much always had to plan to hit traffic, otherwise youâd be really late to wherever you were going, and then when you didnât hit traffic, because you happened to get lucky that day, youâd be way early. Just like awesome, awesome.â
Me: âHaha, standing around awkwardly. Did you have another question; you looked like you were going to ask her.â
Nick: âNo I donât really have I donât think we really have anything else. What about you guys?â
Stetson: âI came up with one more. Alright, sorry. All these questions.â
Kim: âI donât mind, hahahahâ
Stetson: âI mean, weâve talked about your past and where you are right now. Going into the future, you talked about maybe going back to school. I was just wondering, do you see yourself having a professorship, or managing a lab, or do you really think that you are going to kind of stay where you are, and that you are where you want to be?â
Kim: âI donât see myself as being a professor. Even if I did decide to go back to school I donât see myself going quite that far. Honestly, at this point if I went back to school it would probably be for a masterâs in probably immunology. The lab Iâm in now, thereâs a lot of immunology work. Which is kind of one thing that Iâve found Iâm lacking a little bit, being in this lab, because a BME degree really doesnât give you much in the way of an immunology background. Umm, so Iâve been having to learn things as I go when it comes to the more technical immunology information. My professorâs actually going to have me audit the senior level immunology course in the spring, just to kind of catch up on the stuff that BME didnât cover, that, one of the more pure sciences degree might have. Again, your tradeoffs. I guess he [her employer] was willing to take me on anyways, so I canât complain. But I think I would more stick to the masters level, which can help me move up within a lab, to maybe being more of a lab manager underneath the professor whoâs actually the person running the lab. but kind of being able to be in a position where I can mentor people below me in a lab position. Versus right now, I donât have anybody reporting to me. So I think that would be one thing that would be really nice to work toward in the future and kind of put myself in the position for.â
Stetson: âAlright, well I donât think anybody has any other questionsâ
Nick: âYeah this was a great interview, we got a lot of information. [We] appreciate it.â
Kim: âNo problem and if you guys come up with a anything else, my phone number was in my email, feel free to [contact me]â
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Problem with Interview Files
The files are separated and tumblr only allows one audio file post a day. There are 7 files, so I am not sure how to do this...Â
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Audio
The audio files are separate and have to be uploaded one at a time.
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Team Contract Group 9
This group contract has been drafted to encourage group cooperation, establish guidelines for acceptable and expected workloads, and to produce the most successful environment for our group to thrive in.
Guide Lines
Attendance to class is mandatory.
o   Unless member is sick, responding to family emergency, etc.
Decisions are made with a super-majority of team member approval
o   Tiebreakers will be determined by re-vote.
If team members are in a conflict, they should resolve their conflict without disturbing the working environment of the group.
If a team member cannot make a group meeting they are responsible for the covering of discussed material through another group member.
Acceptable means of team communication:
o   Emails
o   Text messaging
o   Verbally via phone
Breaking of Rules
Team members will be noted during team examination periods for a lack of cooperation.
Examination score will be penalized for multiple missed classes and group meetings (2+).
If a team member does not complete the work he or she is responsible for, then their peer examination score will be hurt.
Team Project
Positions and workloads of the term project will be distributed based on volunteers for positions and team memberâs skill sets. However, respectively equal workloads will be designated, regardless of volunteerism.
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