Why I Am Interested in the Medical Field: My Passion

I was always interested in the medical field as a kid and always wondered about how the human body works. My intentions were not actually to be a person entitled as doctor but very much a person who has knowledge about health sciences. “Why are you interested in the medical field?” - this is an essay where I will share story of my academic achievements and what I'm going to do in the future. 

After I completed my high school, I landed upon a program called Human Biology. It was comprised of all the aspects I could think of: little bit of basic science, introductory and as well as detailed courses of theoretical medicine such as anatomy, physiology. I understood at its very sight that this is the program for me and hence, I ended up taking this course as an undergrad.

Throughout my academic year I completed various projects. There were actually field or laboratory projects during my first and second years of my studies. As I advanced towards my third year and fourth year, I get to study various subjects related to medical. I was amazed as well as thrilled to learn how a human body works, how medicines we take, cure our diseases and have certain effects on our bodies, what happens to the food we take. Stepping into my fourth year was a turning point in my career choices. The final year project was a different type of project for me, which introduced me to hospital systems about patients' data. The project was entitled: 'Factors affecting turnaround time in the clinical laboratory of the Kathmandu University Hospital, Nepal' and recently published on February 2019 issue of The Journal of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine.

This redirected my interest in health science to technology in health: more towards data management and analysis. During data collection I had to go through various patient report on computer as well as on the forms(test request forms). I had to note down the test request time, sample collection times and report dispatch times, and at the end calculate the turnaround times along with the reasons for delayed reports. However, the IT department of the hospital did a pretty good job regarding the data management of the patients but at some point it was still chaotic. As all the information regarding the patients was not digitized, it was quite time consuming as well as confusing to collect the required data. 

Overall I really wanted to learn how to manage and analyse patient data, which ultimately made me look upon the masters program that coincides with my interests and this led me to MS in Health informatics, this program even offered more to my expectations.