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Submission information
Submission Number: 388
Submission ID: 1328
Submission UUID: 765750e3-2d1b-44b8-9d04-a36791d0f6b0
Created: Tue, 03/26/2024 - 18:56
Completed: Tue, 03/26/2024 - 18:56
Changed: Tue, 05/06/2025 - 04:31
Remote IP address: 2a09:bac1:76a0:84c8::2c8:3
Submitted by:Anonymous
Language: English
Is draft: No
Locked: Yes
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Reema
Patadia
they/them
Erie
CO
United States
80516
Biomedical Engineering
English (5), Gujrati (3)
A valuable experience of my high school career was being a part of the Colorado Student Leader’s Institute (COSLI). This opportunity exposed me to so many new perspectives and experiences that I’ll never forget. The program welcomed participants from vastly different communities and backgrounds, a lot of whom were entirely different from me. Coming from a small school, I didn’t meet a variety of people when it came to social identities, political stances, or backgrounds they were raised in. The kids at COSLI, however, introduced me to differing gender identities, sexualities, cultures, and lived experiences. From small rural towns hours away to living 5 minutes off the Denver University campus, it felt refreshing to hear about how amazingly different the lives of kids my age were from mine. It’s been almost 3 years since COSLI now and I still keep in touch with many of the friends I’ve made during that time. It’s incredible seeing how different their future paths are from mine as we all approach graduation, and I’m grateful for listening to their life stories during our short time together.
At COSLI, I traveled all over Denver to attend educational lectures by university professors, congressmen, and business owners. Hearing these people, along with my COSLI peers, talk about their lived experiences and very contrasting backgrounds and identities showed me the importance of new and differing perspectives. Listening to how diverse each of these speakers was opened my eyes to see just how many voices were involved in modern-day problems, and helped me expand my thinking of how I can try to help all of these voices. For example, as someone living in the US, I never knew how much hospitalized patients in developing countries were suffering from the lack of healthcare equipment. My lived experience in this country had honestly blindsided me from how lucky I was to be able to receive adequate healthcare. However, after listening to a speaker in COSLI talk about how one of the main reasons for immigrants to come to the US was being able to have access to healthcare, I now want to be able to come up with solutions to help these patients outside my country as a biomedical engineer. It’s why I want to be a part of current efforts to recycle used biomedical products such as pacemakers because they can be used to help people in need and keep a low burden on the environment by eliminating production waste. If I hadn’t met these speakers and newfound friends at COSLI, I wouldn’t have ever seen how unique people were from each other, and how allowing them to have a voice to show their perspectives can lead to a better society.
At COSLI, I traveled all over Denver to attend educational lectures by university professors, congressmen, and business owners. Hearing these people, along with my COSLI peers, talk about their lived experiences and very contrasting backgrounds and identities showed me the importance of new and differing perspectives. Listening to how diverse each of these speakers was opened my eyes to see just how many voices were involved in modern-day problems, and helped me expand my thinking of how I can try to help all of these voices. For example, as someone living in the US, I never knew how much hospitalized patients in developing countries were suffering from the lack of healthcare equipment. My lived experience in this country had honestly blindsided me from how lucky I was to be able to receive adequate healthcare. However, after listening to a speaker in COSLI talk about how one of the main reasons for immigrants to come to the US was being able to have access to healthcare, I now want to be able to come up with solutions to help these patients outside my country as a biomedical engineer. It’s why I want to be a part of current efforts to recycle used biomedical products such as pacemakers because they can be used to help people in need and keep a low burden on the environment by eliminating production waste. If I hadn’t met these speakers and newfound friends at COSLI, I wouldn’t have ever seen how unique people were from each other, and how allowing them to have a voice to show their perspectives can lead to a better society.
Throughout my time in high school, I felt like I barely had anyone to trust or work with despite being in a batch of over 100 kids. I was stuck in a community where people kept things close to themselves and were obsessed with doing things just for the sake of getting into a good college that had their major. It was shocking to hear that the motivation behind impactful projects or innovations that my peers created was another thing they could simply add to their college applications and that they had no plans to try and continue or build upon those amazing creations to help even more people. I also remember it being hard to join any type of study group in my school or find peers I could work together with to figure out hard problems in rigorous classes because of my batch’s attitude of every project or activity being for the sake of ‘getting ahead’ of others in the college process. The number of times I’ve felt isolated in my own supposed community was shocking, given how I thought that these were my peers, people who had the potential to help uplift others through the college process if they only trusted each other and worked together.
Because of my past experiences of dealing with a non-unified community, I hope that someone living down the hall from me in the Global Engineering RAP is a person who holds values that facilitate a cooperating community. I want someone who understands that the people they’re living with are not people they have to compete against for whatever reason. Instead, they would be a person who helps raise others and themselves to success. I’d like them to be more team-oriented like myself and to genuinely want to make a change in society using their engineering skills. I want them to realize that whether it's initiating or continuing new engineering projects that can help so many people or simply needing emotional/mental support during difficult times, connecting and working together with other people is the best solution. To summarize, I hope the person living near me in the Global Engineering RAP could be someone I can truly connect with: someone who is open-minded and wants to actively work with other fellow RAP engineers to help elevate and improve communities.
Because of my past experiences of dealing with a non-unified community, I hope that someone living down the hall from me in the Global Engineering RAP is a person who holds values that facilitate a cooperating community. I want someone who understands that the people they’re living with are not people they have to compete against for whatever reason. Instead, they would be a person who helps raise others and themselves to success. I’d like them to be more team-oriented like myself and to genuinely want to make a change in society using their engineering skills. I want them to realize that whether it's initiating or continuing new engineering projects that can help so many people or simply needing emotional/mental support during difficult times, connecting and working together with other people is the best solution. To summarize, I hope the person living near me in the Global Engineering RAP could be someone I can truly connect with: someone who is open-minded and wants to actively work with other fellow RAP engineers to help elevate and improve communities.
For as long as I’ve known environmental science and biomedical engineering are two passions that I love and adore. Even though I knew that I wanted to pursue biomedical engineering and environmental science, I always felt a disconnect between these career choices. How could I possibly begin to combine them in my future? Though both fields focused on directly improving certain demographics, biomedical engineering focused on improving human health, whereas environmental science focused on improving the environment. My perspective of these two fields never intertwining entirely changed when I enrolled in a contest called “ALL Careers,” which focused on enforcing the idea of finding ways that environmental stewardship can align with any career field in the world, not just “environmental” careers. Programming a website that highlighted how sustainability can be achieved in any engineering career made me realize that my biomedical engineering and environmental stewardship passions can and should be intertwined. Reading about efforts to sterilize harvested pacemakers that can then be reused in third-world countries and manufacturing recyclable contact lenses, I dream of connecting environmental studies to biomedical engineering and creating innovations that care for both people and the Earth at the same time.
With the Global Engineering RAP, I’m confident that I can get a head start on my sustainable biomedical engineering career and can begin creating long-lasting solutions that help healthcare systems and Earth’s ecosystems. The RAP fosters an environment that allows me to connect and work with a variety of people who can provide me with valuable perspectives that can help us blaze the frontiers of biomedical sustainability. My desire to integrate sustainability within the field of biomedical engineering is a prime example of what the Global Engineering RAP facilitates, and I want to join in and help other fellow engineers achieve our goal of improving communities through our engineering skill sets. As a biomedical engineering major with a sustainable focus in the Global Engineering RAP, I will confront real-world health problems by innovating solutions that can both improve healthcare outlooks and provide care for the environment.
With the Global Engineering RAP, I’m confident that I can get a head start on my sustainable biomedical engineering career and can begin creating long-lasting solutions that help healthcare systems and Earth’s ecosystems. The RAP fosters an environment that allows me to connect and work with a variety of people who can provide me with valuable perspectives that can help us blaze the frontiers of biomedical sustainability. My desire to integrate sustainability within the field of biomedical engineering is a prime example of what the Global Engineering RAP facilitates, and I want to join in and help other fellow engineers achieve our goal of improving communities through our engineering skill sets. As a biomedical engineering major with a sustainable focus in the Global Engineering RAP, I will confront real-world health problems by innovating solutions that can both improve healthcare outlooks and provide care for the environment.
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