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My Growth in Career Interest
Over my time at DRSS, my career interest has shifted, transformed, and grown. What started as Cloning, turned to Biomedical Engineering, then into Regenerative Medicine. All have stayed within the confounds of being biologically related, in one way or another; and with the intention to help people.
The first instance of this interest was in 8th grade, in the Genius Hour Project. In this project, we were tasked to create our own research question, then explore it. To this day I don't know what sparked this interest, but the question I created was; "Is growing people a possible career?" This was my first foray biomedical processes, and opened me up to the ideas of research, experimenting, and exploring outlandish ideas.
Two years later, in 10th grade, I still held this interest, and got the ability to shadow Dr. Andrew Voss at Wright State University. Thanks to the research I had done already, I had a semblance of an idea of what I wanted to do, but it wasn't until I shadowed Dr. Voss that I got a name for it: Regenerative Medicine. We discussed more about it, some of it's real world applications, and tried to meet with a teacher at Wright State who actually specialized in Regenerative Medicine; however, they unfortunately weren't there. But this still gave me a hope, that what I wanted to do with my life was an actual career. That there were local resources to obtain it. It was real.
At the Dayton Regional STEM School, students take Biology as their 10th grade science. Biology, of course, naturally lends itself to medicine, the way the body works, and much more relevant knowledge. 10th grade biology was the beginning of me starting to take more relevant courses to further my knowledge. The next two years, I would continue down the Medical Pathway at DRSS, taking the Anatomy & Physiology and Medical Interventions classes.
Entering 11th grade, each student was given the ability to specialize further with the ability to choose an elective course that year. I chose Anatomy & Physiology, or Anat & Phys (or even just A&P). Through this course I learned about the different parts and systems of the human body, as well as how they worked. Understanding how the body functions, its parts, its systems, and the integration of them, naturally help lead to a career in the medically field, were my work will impact these systems.
This year, I am enrolled in a class called Medical Interventions (or MI). MI is a biomedical science class where we follow the life of a fictional family and investigate the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. It’s a class with a lot of real-world application, as we study cases, interventions, and careers. While the past two years I have been taking classes that increased and gave a further understanding of the career I want to do, this year I finally had the chance to take a class that gave a more general feeling of what it would feel like.