Making a career decision is difficult. After all, it is something you might be doing for your whole life. And with enticing options all over the choice, innumerable college and high school students—including myself at some point—need help deciding whether to go into a technology-related career or healthcare. Both categories are broad, often requiring exposure to the many possibilities available until you find the most enjoyable one. To help those who may currently be struggling with that decision, I’ll be talking about some of the careers that exist under both categories. And for the many of you future surgeons reading this and thinking, “How does this apply to me?”, consider this—healing isn’t limited to the operating room. At MedConnect, we encourage you to contribute to the care of your patients in ways that the pre-surgical path doesn’t let. There’s nothing stopping you from being a surgeon with passions in creating pacemakers that resolve the issues you see in your patients, or code systems to help your hospital run more efficiently—nothing except lacking a certain interest and curiosity that I hope can foster. Besides, the work you’ll do in the OR isn’t a one-person job. This article helps shed some light over the unsung members of the healthcare system, so that you develop a familiarity of the team behind you and know how it works. This is a key component of an effective physician. But I digress. Let’s get back to the exciting stuff.
If you’re interested in constructing medical devices to help diagnose or fit the needs of patients, then you should consider biomedical engineering. There are more specific careers associated with biomedical engineering, such as biomechanics and genetic engineering, but they all share a core idea of fusing engineering with healthcare. Biomedical engineering jobs require knowledge to be applied to solve problems and meet the needs of specific people and systems. Tasks like these hardly get repetitive so if you’re looking for new and exciting experiences, consider this a top choice.
A more overlooked career that is just as vital for any form of large systems—like patient care—is data analysis. Although it’s more to do with technology, there are healthcare-related conclusions that the data analysts will have to draw. The job will require proficiency with databases, programming, and data visualization systems to help quickly process and model large amounts of patient data. As a data analyst, you’ll be the bridge between the numbers and the patient. The effect data analysts have on healthcare may not be straightforward, but they are imperative, especially for larger scale healthcare providers.
The final career I’ll be mentioning is health informatics specialists. The job consists of applying your knowledge of computer science, nursing, research, etc. in collaboration with other health informatics to form solutions, decision-support systems, and many more of the underlying intricacies between the human-technology interaction that takes place in healthcare contexts. If you appreciate having a team to contribute to and work with, you may find this enjoyable.
As a reminder, my goal here was not to give you the minor details on these jobs. My goal was to expose you to the possibilities you have, and that it’s not just tech or healthcare you need to strictly choose between. Obviously, I only discussed three of the many such career crossovers, but there are almost infinitely more available. And as technology continues to develop, it may create jobs that may not have previously been obvious career options. If you’re struggling to choose a career, expose yourself to the choices that surround you, let your natural curiosity guide you, and soon come to a choice that will satisfy you.
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