Episode 1: Richard Shi

October 28, 2018

Lately, I’ve been thinking about where I can really apply my other passions in medical school, without forgetting the work I’ve done in the past or the lessons I’ve learned. I don’t think I really understood how much studying I was going to do in med school. Before I arrived, I loved design, entrepreneurship, and biomedical engineering and was actively involved in these things. But now, I’m really more into a daily study grind. Of course, I’m not regretful of my time now - I’m learning a lot of amazing things and I’m so happy to be here. But before, I was always working on some kind of project. I’m optimistic that I’ll find my niche here, but losing that individuality is something I’m scared of.

Before I went to college, I had a few high school friends that took gap years to build their own companies. They were my best friends, and I wanted to do what my friends did. So, when I arrived at college, I worked with some friends on a startup called ShapeU. It was a great time. We built a web platform to match together newcomers to fitness into small groups of three to five, and paired them with a personal trainer for a group workout session. It was a really awesome experience because I got to interact with a lot of community members in Baltimore. I even got to work with some people dealing with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or weight issues, and utilized our resources to help them lead healthier lives.

That was a time in my life when I didn’t want to go into medicine. I was meeting all these amazing people, helping people, and getting recognition way earlier than I expected. But after a while, I began to think about the impact I was making on others. We wanted to solve a problem affecting millions of Americans, but was our business impacting people the way that I wanted to?

At one point, my team considered dropping out of college and moving to San Francisco. That’s when I started to really think about myself as a person outside the company. It took a lot of soul searching and it was pretty tough. What kind of impact did I want to make on society? Did I want to work on this startup for the rest of my life? Was I giving up on medicine? After a stressful period, I decided to stay in school and left the company before my junior year. It was around this time that I began to take medicine more seriously. I wanted to better understand what it was like to help someone and impact them on a more personal level.

During that time, I was kind of having a quarter-life crisis. I just wanted to get away from everything for a while. So, I took the opportunity to spend two months in Rwanda in summer to fix medical devices in rural hospitals. That was the first time I went out of my comfort zone and traveled to a foreign country. I got to use other languages like Kinyarwanda and French to talk to the locals. The Rwandan people were some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life. I spent a lot of time at the hospital, seeing what issues affected people there, how little the doctors had to work with, and how much they could still accomplish. I saw incredible, intimate moments between physicians and patients.

I also learned that the majority of equipment in rural hospitals is donated from developed countries. Conceptually, it’s an amazing idea. But, a donation is not meant to meet specific needs of the country. You might not have the right voltage source available, the plug might be different, or the instruction manuals may be in a completely different language. For example, one hospital had perfectly functional baby incubators for years. However, they just didn’t know how to set them up or how to use them until we came in to translate the manual. That’s the biggest thing I got out of that trip: we’ve got to understand the needs of the people and their environment before we go out and help them.

It was around this time that I fell in love with user design, and creating medical devices and healthcare services that met the needs of people that truly needed them. I loved the idea of incorporating and understanding a lot of different perspectives in order to help someone. And honestly, I think that the clinical work that a doctor does is very similar to that, and offers me that face-to-face connection that I really value from other people. I didn’t want to build software or engineer a device to help people if I couldn’t really see the impact firsthand. That was the shift for me towards medicine - it’s not about how many people I can impact at once, but more about how deeply I can impact each person.

What are your 5 Most Recently Played Artists on Spotify?
88 Rising, Joji, Logic, Mac Miller, Maroon 5

If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose?
It would be to run really fast like a cheetah or a jaguar and jump over things. That’d be cool to do, like those parkour people.

Pick something or someone from NYMC to give a shout out to!
My roommates, Kelvin Zheng and Albert Wu. We’re really close and they’re the best roommates I could ask for!

If someone wanted to talk to you, they should lead with…
Literally anything about tennis!