Posted: February 17, 2017, 2:27pm
What if instead of going to your own classes or doing your own research you picked one day to do something completely different? The idea is probably either very exciting or very scary! But I got the opportunity to work in a totally new environment outside of Viterbi for a one-week contest.
Photo: The team at the Health Sciences Campus. Chris Chu (far right), Justin Siu (second from right), Priyanka Vachhani (center), Rodrigo Rangel (second from left), me (left).
Emory University hosts a global health case competition every year and USC Institute for Global Health conducted an internal competition this week to find the best teams to represent the Trojans. Admittedly a competition like this would not be on my radar at all, but I got convinced by some friends in different schools to give it a shot. I worked with Priyanka Vachhani (MS student in Global Medicine), Chri Chu (BS student in accounting), Rodrigo Rangel (MS student in BME), and Justin Siu (MS student in Global Medicine).
Photo: brainstorming session in a Fertitta Hall classroom.
The problems statement for the case competition was to increase access to cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries in rural Nicaragua, a country which has 0.897 physicians/1000 people (source: WHO, Global Health Observatory) and recorded 2,897 surgeries/100,000 people recorded in 2012 (source: World Bank, The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery). Our team’s solution was a crowd-sourced healthcare platform which optimizes medical missions based on data collected on the frontlines of rural Nicaragua. Although our team did not get selected as finalists, it was a great learning experience for me because I got to step outside my comfort zone and collaborate with students from different colleges at USC. As a bonus, we got to work in the new Fertitta Hall study rooms which are a pretty awesome place to work for small teams.
Published on July 27th, 2017
Last updated on August 10th, 2017