I&E Coursework

The elective courses I selected for my I&E certificate pathway, Technology & Design, are EGR 101: Engineering Design & Communication and I&E 350: Customer Empathy & Brand Design. I pursued this pathway because in high school I was always interested in STEM, but my work so far had emulated an academic research environment. While research at this level can be extraordinary, I learned that my work is meaningful to me when it is industry-based and, with hard work, has realistic potential of being used in patients. Additionally, I want to be at the forefront of innovation, rather than optimization, which is why working at a company developing early-stage devices and then creating a startup of my own excites me.

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In EGR 101 I learned real-world problem solving that was directly applicable to my desire for a career in innovation and design. I worked with a team of fellow engineers to build a solution for the Durham Museum of Life and Science who wanted their bulls to have more daily movement without requiring extra attention from the staff. Through iterative brainstorming and prototyping designed and built a functioning model of a multi-compartment, motion-sensor feeder. In this class, I learned the intricate processes used to design solutions beginning with a simple problem statement. I need to use this mindset as I approach a career in medical device entrepreneurship and consider essential objectives and constraints for a design solution. I also learned that every real-world problem requires an interdisciplinary solution and built a mindset where I constantly consider multiple perspectives. I applied this in my internship last summer when I needed to consider how introducing a novel medical device would impact various stakeholders.

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Customer Empathy & Brand Design was my first business-focused class and my favorite class that I took last semester. I decided to take this class purely out of interest, but I have already applied concepts I learned in this class to my internship at S2N Health. Customer pathways and segmentation were concepts I was introduced to in this class and adapted to the various medical device markets for projects during my internship. I also learned about the relationship between the customer and the company and the importance of a mission. While this can come across easily to customers in the medical device market, it is most important to consider internally. It is a difficult balance between economic and social impact when developing and marketing a medical device, so frequently reassuring the company’s purpose can keep them on a positive trajectory.

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Due to scheduling conflicts, I took ENV 767: Entrepreneurial Experience instead of the I&E Keystone, however I learned many of the same concepts. My biggest takeaway from this course was how to assess the success of a company. Dr. von Windheim taught us to ask two questions: what is happening within the company, and what is happening outside the company? This means that in order to understand how a business is functioning and how to improve it, a third party needs to look at each of these factors. Internal assessment would include the team, financials, product, etc. External assessment would include the market, customers, competitors, etc. We learned many specific techniques as well, such as primary & secondary market research, venture opportunity analysis, financial assessment (P&L, cash flow), and more, but these guiding questions stuck with me and will aid me in future business situations.

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Each of these courses helped me develop skills necessary to apply to my future career in the medical device industry. As an engineer I need the technical innovation skills I learned in EGR 101, but I also need to have my customer's (physicians, patients, etc.) wants and needs in mind, otherwise I will never be able to sell a product, which I learned in both I&E 350 and ENV 767. ENV 767 allowed me to put everything I had learned in my I&E courses so far towards a client project assessing a mini mass spectrometer. I applied my technical knowledge from EGR 101 to understand the client's product, the market, and competitors. I also used my knowledge of the customer from I&E 350 and other analysis skills from earlier in ENV 767 to assess the potential for the adoption of the device. This project simulated a potential scenario that I could encounter with my own medical device startup one day, and the curriculum from each of the three classes was essential to completing the assignment. Overall, Technology & Design I&E pathway allowed me to develop technical science and analytical business skills and was my first step in pursuing a career in the medical device industry.​