My path from medicine into technology

This month, I moved from Boston to San Francisco and took a role at Pivotal Labs. And despite having ‘labs’ in the name, this lab is unlike any other that I’ve worked in.

You see, Pivotal Labs is a software company, and it’s never really been my plan to, well, ‘do software’. My goal–the one I’ve spent countless nights thinking over–has always been med school, but that changed this spring.

The excitement of medicine

In school, I toyed with the idea of becoming an electrical engineer, but medicine won me over. The chance to learn more about the elusive world of microbes and use that for the benefit of humanity was too much to pass up.

And for five years now, that world has been exciting.

I’ve had the chance to study pathogens including Francisella tularensis, Vibrio cholera, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, both on their own and interacting with animal cell cultures. I’ve used high-throughput assays to understand how these pathogens work, doing all of it with my own two hands, my brain, and lots of advice from professors and mentors. (And by reading oh so many papers.) Microbiology and medicine have taken me across the world, including to summer residences in Spain and Croatia, and I’ve met incredible people along the way.

And looking ahead, my eventual goal has been to become a doctor who could sit with his patients and really get to know them, to care for them directly.

Reality sets in

Being surrounded by the medical community, though, I’ve had a front-row seat into what my future could be. On the one hand, I’ve seen passionate physicians saving lives and caring deeply about their profession.

On the other hand, it’s clear to me that medicine is changing. In particular, I’m struck by how doctors are now encouraged to handle as many patients as possible in a given time span rather than giving each of them the best of care, however long that might take. Patient relationships are crammed into 15-minute increments, and it sometimes feels like the system is the caretaker and not individual doctors.

Maybe it’s naive of me, but the reason I wanted to be a doctor was to care for patients, and to do so to the best of my ability. Seeing a different vision has made me rethink the likelihood of that future.

Technology and me

What do you do when you have a personal crisis like this? Well, I’ll tell you what I did. I tried to slow down and pay attention to what kinds of work I really enjoy. And it turns out, I really enjoy technology, especially when it makes people’s lives better.

Computers have been a hobby of mine since I was 10 years old, when I started programming BASIC on a VTech learning laptop. I remember my excitement when I learned I could tell my computer what to do, and that I could get it to ‘remember’ things for me. When I was in high school, I moved on to Java and C++, which showed me what programs looked like when you started to build structure into them. Guy Steele’s Growing a Language talk is still one of my favorites. More recently, I’ve gravitated toward Ruby, Clojure, and Haskell, each for their own reasons. Haskell is probably my favorite. (If only more people agreed!)

Beyond the technology, Boston’s startup scene has shown me that the puzzle-solving side of computer science can be really meaningful. (And building something that millions of people depend on every day has got to be fun, too.)

Avoiding med school will leave me with time and focus to help out real people right now, even if that help takes a different form than I’ve been imagining.

So after a lot of thought and too many mind maps, I’m sure about the direction I’m taking. I’m excited to focus squarely on technology and to see how I can use it to impact people’s lives. And who knows? Maybe some day–I keep telling myself–I’ll find a way to blend both medicine and technology into something even more meaningful. Here’s hoping.