Skill Sets:

Product design and development, rapid/inexpensive prototyping, additive manufacturing, structured ideation and need identification. Overall I love designing for the human element in a product!

Aspirations:

I am an avid designer and aspire to build a career around that. I am currently working as in early product development of surgical devices at Medtronic and designing a medical device for Children’s Hospital. I like medical devices because of the human element and the beneficial influences offered,  but am not married the field. I would be more interested in driving innovative solutions to challenging design problems and working on new things than staying in medical forever.

Looking forward, I am keen to apply my product development and design experience in a more customer-facing role. I could foresee perhaps starting a design consultancy that focuses on helping people identify their product needs and help bring those ideas and needs to fruition. After completing my MS, I could also foresee staying technical for a few year (3, 5, 10?) years and then transitioning toward the business side of product development, which may require an MBA. Perhaps a more wild tangent would be IP law and focus on helping people develop product from the IP side of the process. My entire life people have told me I should be a lawyer, I simply have enjoyed product design too much up this point :).