The Roads We Take

My father came to the States from Palestine at a young age to pursue his dream of playing soccer. Due to injuries, however, he gave up on the dream and started working for a humanitarian organization. After my sister and I were born, our parents decided to move back to Palestine to raise us closer to our roots. We lived there for a while until the organization my father worked for was shut down and he was forced to leave the country. And so we moved back to the States once again. Life had taught him early on that it owed nobody anything; that life was about more than living for oneself.  

Growing up, my parents cemented the same lesson in my mind as we worked many a weekend at the community center. I was never told to become something specific when I grew up. I just understood that whatever I chose, it had to be something I could excel at and something I can use to give back to my community. These were the values I grew up with and the same ones that continue to guide me, even today.

In high school, I didn’t think too much about the big career questions. I was good at my subjects and chose to focus on the present as I juggled my school, community, and family responsibilities. I knew that I loved maths and I figured that that  kind of certainty would take care of itself. Sure enough, when the time came to pick a college to apply to it was a pretty straightforward decision for me. I liked math. Math = engineering and so I applied to the college of engineering at my state university. 

But once I got into engineering college, I had to start thinking about declaring my major. I was the kind of person who wanted to try everything and anything. Picking one meant losing out on all the others. Come year end, I was still super indecisive about my major; it felt as though picking a major would decide my entire future. 

Biomedical engineering, however, caught my attention. Biomed is involved in, in addition to other things, the making of prosthetic limbs. The more I learned about it, the more I began to see myself growing into it and so I picked it as my major. I started dreaming of a career where I helped provide prosthetic limbs to people affected by war and trauma. I wanted to give back to the people of my homeland and help them gain the mobility they lost. The program was one of the hardest ones in the college but I felt up for the challenge. A meaningful career was coming closer to a reality.

Around my third year, I started looking into research and internships. I got in touch with the PI of a lab that worked on prosthetic limbs (among other things) which seemed to have my name written on it. I was fortunate enough to land a research internship with the lab and worked with them for a year and a half. Here, I got to interact with a lot of different people, doctors, prosthetists, nurses, and patients. It was a very insightful experience.

As my third-year was coming to an end, I realized I needed a more work-oriented internship. So far my studies and internship had been very research-based and I knew that after graduation, research was not what I wanted to get into. It was time to look for something different. So when the career fair came around, I attended. Medical device companies are big in Minnesota as it happened, so I figured I’d apply to one at the fair.

But things don’t happen in the same way you figure they would. At the career fair, I was pulled aside by the stall of a big consulting company. The representatives at the stall were so personable and engaging, I ended up applying to their internship even though a consulting company was the last thing on my mind. I’d also applied to a medical device company and that seemed like the more likely choice. 

After I got calls for a second interview from both companies and got to know both firms a bit better, I realized that the consulting firm was much better organized and had a more robust internship program. Unlikely as it was, I ended up doing a  summer-long internship with the consulting company. It was my first glimpse into the corporate world and it was as enjoyable as it was educational. 

After the internship, the consulting firm extended me a full time offer to join them right after graduation. I can’t say it was the most obvious outcome, but landing a job straight out of university was a rare opportunity; I was grateful for it and I accepted it. I’d studied biomedical engineering with a certain path in my mind and now getting a job entirely unrelated to my study caused me some internal conflict.

In the end, it came back to my values and my underlying motivation. While I wouldn’t be making prosthetics, there were other ways to give back to my community. And I could take some time to find them; life doesn’t always follow straight paths. I started at the firm soon after my graduation. The job was great, it was stable, the people I worked with were really nice and my family was happy for me. But I distinctly remember being in a meeting once and hearing something along the lines of, 

“We’re a thirty-billion-dollar company. Our goal over the next five years is to be a sixty billion dollar one.”

That didn’t sit right with me. My work and effort had to be going towards more meaningful goals.