Introduction

I am a Bangladeshi-American woman who was influenced heavily by what I saw in my parents’ home country of Bangladesh. I saw the very thing that changed my perspective on my career path. I watched as a woman, who was around my mother’s age, shuffle towards our car in the streets of Bangladesh, but my eyes were trained on one thing–she had no legs.

I always thought that I would go down the medical route and become a doctor–a pediatrician in fact. But that very moment in the streets of Bangladesh helped me realize exactly what I wanted to do. 

Why BME?

From a young age, I knew I wanted to devote my life to helping people. The easiest way that I knew how to do that was to become a doctor. In addition to that life goal, my dad had asked me to add one more goal to my list–to help the impoverished community in Bangladesh. After more discussions with them, I realized that many members of the poorer communities in Bangladesh can’t afford to get medical care, as they have to continuously provide for their family. In the end, though, they can’t treat infections, wounds or terminal illnesses, often-times leading to them losing their limbs, which in turn makes them resort to begging.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

This proverb stuck with me for a long time and I felt that it was applicable in this situation. Helping amputees regain autonomy of their body would help them pursue different types of labor, if needed, while feeling more proud of how they support their family. That’s when I told my parents that I want to fulfill my goal of helping the Bangladeshi community by providing them prosthetic limbs and the subsequent care needed to maintain these prostheses with the help of a team of medical professionals. 

At the time, I didn’t understand that biomedical engineers are the ones at the forefront of creating prosthetics. By the time I reached my junior year of high school, I had done more personal inflection and research, which led me to understand that while I wanted to still stay in something related to medicine, I didn’t want to pursue a medical degree. This, alongside my goal to help those with limb-loss, led me to discovering biomedical engineering.