Today I got to see the insides of a medical physics academic’s office at UCL. The office was littered with books, tech, papers and a whiteboard scrawled with equations. I cannot help feel at home. The mess invoked the emotion that the academic is a person of action, a doer. This is irrational; a room can be messy due to laziness. My initial feelings are based on anecdotes and the fact that my room is messy. Just like everyone else emotion does play a role in my perceptions.

The plan is to expand on my handbook with this lecturer and send it out for publication. The timing seems right. I have had emails from academic fellows from Imperial arranging meetings about their computational medicine degree that they will be offering in 2018 for their medical students. With the introduction of big data, you either have to learn how to code or leave the analysis to someone else. If all medics left the analysis and data processing to someone else the political and academic standing of medicine would take a hit. I have to write another chapter that will instruct on developing a numerical app before we make the pitch.

The academic told me about his assignment in Iran and that one of his students was developing software in tropical islands that monitors medical scanning equipment. When a certain number of devices get near the threshold they then fly the engineer out to the hospitals for calibration in-turn reducing amount of times the engineer has to be flown out. I can barely contain my excitement for this post grad. Not only does this offer a lot of travel and business/start-up opportunities the products you develop can define the future of healthcare and safe thousands of lives. Freedom, creativity, earning potential and meaning/impact is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It’s this that’s made me study and code alongside the 12-hour shifts. I am not alone. The clinicians I have met recently in these circles are all fueled by similar vision and drive.