Who am I?
Currently, I am a Medical Laboratory Technician (MLT) whose purpose is to run patient samples to help Doctors diagnose medical problems. I am the person who releases blood product when a patient is bleeding out, the one who definitively performs the tests and releases the results that prove that you are diabetic, are on too high a dose of lithium, or that you do have influenza. But who do I want to be?
Who have I been?
When I was younger I wanted to do nothing besides download a new bot and stick it in my Starcraft channel or do another Mephisto run in Diablo II. I built a Harry Potter website that was reasonably successful and had a lot of fun doing it. However, like most kids in middle school wasn’t able to look at my interests and visualize a career that used them.
College
When I was in college I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but I knew infectious diseases were fascinating. I came up with ideas like using bacteriophages to combat bacterial infections to help prevent antibiotic resistance and still think it is an important technology to develop. To this day I think that though we all know about the dangers of global warming and global conflicts in the end there is a good chance that infectious disease and antibacterial resistance is what is going to do in a large percent of the population. We have gotten so used to being able to treat so many diseases that we have forgotten that what we can’t treat is growing and what it was like before antibiotics and vaccines. I wanted to work on these problems and was always guided this way by my teachers and academic advisors in college. Little did I know that to do these things that I would need a Ph’D and even then there are very few jobs. Toward the end of college I built my first computer and took a few courses in programming. I scratched the surface of two languages. One was Scheme, the other was Java. I loved it. It was incredibly fun learning to build usable applications! I even started making my own interactive character sheets for a video game I was convinced I would make at some point. However, I only had a semester left and doing a double major would extend the length of my college career significantly. I wasn’t prepared to do that.
Post-College
After I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology I moved out to Seattle and like the majority of my generation promptly got a job in the service industry. For me it was Best Buy. I sold and advised customers on computer products. I think my favorite customer interaction was one in which someone needed a new computer fan and was running around with a CPU heatsink (with the fan attached) convinced it was just the fan and insisted on installing the replacement himself. I am still curious how that went when he got home. After Best Buy I worked various jobs and after much deliberation decided I needed to find stable employment that was not in the service industry. I narrowed it down to two options, a database admin program at a local university or get a MLT certification at the community college. I chose MLT for numerous reasons.
- It was more stable
- It would be easier to get a job
- It would be less expensive
- I would get to work with disease
- Scrubs are really comfortable
- I woud be busy helping people all day which I woud find fulfilling
Now
I think I was right on most counts. So now I am working a rotating evening shift that is the opposite schedule of my friends and family without a change in sight. I am good at what I do (at least I think I am). However, I can do so much more than what I am currently doing. I find the job easy and doesn’t require as much problem solving as I thought it would. The nature of clinical medicine is so impressively procedural that even creating a procedure is procedural. I am underutilized and bound by strict protocols. As a creative and curious person I am using only a fraction of my potential. When we switched our Laboratory Information System to Smarterm I helped design and build the button user interface. It was fun. I wanted to do more but there really isn’t an easy way to transition to LIS from my current positon and there is nothing more I can create due to the procedural nature of the lab and the limitations placed upon me. If I found new employment my job would be very similar and have the same pay since the unions all match the pay of each other at the different hospitals.
So after much soul searching I realized it was time. What I really want in life is to be able to visualize something and create it. I think I was always meant to program.
What do I want?
I want to be able to utilize my creativity and have a schedule where I can spend time with my friends and family. I want to create cool things and have a career where there is a wide variety of career options.
Who am I?
I am that person who is always thinking how to make a process more efficient or has an idea that I want to explore (and make real if possible). I see something that is wrong or could be better (for example the UI’s on the analyzers or LIS system) and I get this itch to look at the code and try to figure out how to fix it or make it better and more usable. Getting into software will allow me to put my ideas into practice and give me skills to fix at least some of tech problems I see around me. I have friends who have websites that I could fix and family members who I can create websites for to help them fulfill their dreams. I can customize a Sci Fi TV show randomizer, or create a video game, or build a website that helps kids and their parents learn to read. This is who I am. I am a creater, I am a builder, I am driven, I am a problem solver and I want to improve systems. I want to give back and make the world better. I can have that opportunity with software and web development. It is said that coding is the future. That’s wrong. The future is now and we should all be coding.