I’ve actually never really kept a blog, but there’s a first for everything. Anywho, my name is Luis, and I’m completing my last quarter at OSU doing the online CS post bacc program. It’s been a long three years and quite a journey.
How did I end up in this program by the way? Well, prior to this I had a whole career in healthcare where I was a case manager, project coordinator, and did quality improvement. Each job partially consisted in data analytics used to measure patient health outcomes and improve services. This led me into a career doing data analytics primarily based on our electronic health records. However, the data I could obtain was always limited by third party vendor software. And so I thought “Hmm… if I could learn programming and software development, then I could pull all the data to my heart’s content!”
My curiosity drove me to take a few courses at community college, and I realized how much I really enjoyed programming — to the point where I would spend the long wee hours of the night developing solutions. I thought, why not make this into a career? I researched online what programs were available, discovered the OSU-CS reddit community, learned about the program & applied, and viola! I am now stuck with you fabulous people.
This year I’ve been particularly fortunate to land a summer internship at Medtronic, the world’s leading medical device company in the world. Fancy huh? I actually do feel lucky! They create all sorts of cool products, such as spinal implants, pace makers, and insulin pumps for diabetes. Now my internship was with the firmware and infusion team, which is responsible for developing the firmware for Medtronic’s Diabetes Insulin Pumps technology (Link: https://www.medtronicdiabetes.com/products/minimed-770g-insulin-pump-system). It short, it involves programming embedded systems and microcontrollers. The internship experience was great, and I got to develop a graphical utility application that will help the development team visually analyze the improved performance of the algorithms used for future generations of insulin pumps. At the end of the internship, I was given an offer, and will officially begin working as a full software engineer starting February 2022.
I feel fortunate because I was worried that I might temporarily forgo a career in healthcare after graduating. This is partly because as an aspiring software engineer, I would have resigned working at a non-healthcare company. However, with my internship, I was able to combine my education in CS with my passion for working on projects and products that improve the health outcomes of people. Plus, med-tech is a continually evolving frontier with so many cool and exciting opportunities. Career 2.0, here I come!
Oh yea, and I look forward to documenting my journey for the CS 467!
