A Lesson in Uncertainty: How FAER Helped an Engineer Find His Calling

There are few things in medicine as frustrating as uncertainty. For most of us, uncertainties abound every day in our professional lives – in diagnosis, in treatment, in outcome, and on a more personal level, in career trajectory. But, for me, there has always been one certainty that I have clung to in my professional life – that I was always an engineer. Growing up, I tinkered with the inner workings of radios, telephones or whatever I could find. In high school I gravitated towards mathematics and the physical sciences such that a major in engineering seemed obvious to me. But being also fascinated with the life sciences, I settled on the emerging field of biomedical engineering at Boston University. While I had no firm plans after college, the opportunity to complete pre-medical requirements as a part of the curriculum allowed me to keep my future options open. A...