DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

 

For the interdisciplinary section I took FSE 150 Grand Challenges and ASB 462 Medical Anthropology. For FSE 150 Grand Challenges the course gave me an overview on the grand challenges in engineering and it was my first experience in forming a team and attempting to solve a problem in my college career. This class was important in the Grand Challenge Scholar curriculum because it geared me towards a theme to pursue, but at the same time exposing me to the other grand challenges of engineering that I did not have a strong knowledge foundation in.

 

The next interdisciplinary course I took was ASB 462 Medical Anthropology where I learned about the ethical and cultural challenges a doctor or a person developing medicine faces when placed in cultural backgrounds they may not be fully aware of. This course made me aware of the fact that some of medical devices and medicines that I may percieve as helpful may be actually harmful in terms of how the patient views the device or medicine. In the future, when I develop a device or medicine for the healthcare field I will take into account the ethical dilemmas and the various cultures that it will be implemented in. Right now in my biomedical engineering capstone project the device is a surgical instrument for a fetal surgery and fetal surgery is one area that some cultures simply do not allow. Because of this cultural dilemma it arises an ethical dilemma, where the fetus if diagnosed with a defect when checked via ultrasound then does the doctor just let the fetus die because of the cultural barrier? This is just one challenge that shows the complexity in medical anthropolgy and an area that has made me a better engineer. 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.