Since the day I turned 16 til the day I left to begin my studies at Lehigh, I worked on my local fire department and gained the skills to be a legitimate firefighter. Upon joining the fire department, I quickly realized my passion for helping others. I feel extremely grateful for what I have and I feel as though I should use the opportunities I have to help those who may be less fortunate. The experiences I had on my local fire department lead me to enroll in CINQ 396, I have experience helping others and I wanted to continue that even while I was in college. I had the opportunity to impact the lives of many people I knew in my home town and it made me realize how lucky I am. This feeling has lead me to pursue a career where I am able to help people throughout the world. As someone who has grow up in a society where people make more money than the people in many other countries I feel it would be selfish of me not to use my situation to help those who are not able to live the way we live.
This course will help me become a very accomplished bio engineer due to the many interesting situations that will arise throughout the coming semesters. There will be issues regarding supply and demand, materials, production, consumer need, culture and many other topics. These situations will allow me to gain experiences which can only be gained through working on these types of projects. Throughout the development of a product you will need to work as a team to solve many difficult problems, these are skills that businesses are always looking for and want all of their workers to have. Problem solving, critical thinking, and communication are skills that all employers are looking for yet it is often difficult to display these skills through a resume but this course will allow me to stand out above the competition, showing that I have been able to work in a team on projects that have made real impact throughout the world. The experiences that I will gain in the coming semesters will allow me to have valuable experiences that many of my peers will not have had the opportunity to acquire.
The lack of optometrists within Kenya can be looked at in two ways, getting people glasses immediately and also training more optometrists. I believe a team of people could develop glasses which are cheaper than those in the western world which could be mass produced within or around Kenya for people to buy at their local stores or markets. This would allow people to try the glasses and get some immediate relief for their vision issues. This would be a temporary solution while another group of people would be working on training more people to be optometrists within Kenya. The cheap glasses could serve as a placeholder until the new optometrists become trained. The training system should be left in place so more people can follow the same path and allow for a health amount of optometrists throughout the country. These optometrists could also use the cheaper glasses due to the fact that many people in Kenya do not have the same type of income that people in the western world have. Although the cheap glasses make logical sense, they may not be culturally accepted throughout the country which would mean that they would fail as a product. To counter this, a team may have to develop very cheap contacts and see if those would be more socially acceptable within the Kenyan culture. Once the optometrists have been trained, they will be able to spread out and reach many of the rural areas in Kenya which may never have had many medical professionals at their disposal. The group that trains the optometrists will be able to lay the ground work for future training, creating institutes which will be able to train more optometrists and other health professionals in the future. The theoretical groundwork for these optometrists could lead to many changes throughout the entirety. To summarize, it would be beneficial to come up with a very cheap temporary solution to the widespread vision issues. This solution will be used until the optometrists have been sufficiently trained. These optometrists will be able to treat many of the people throughout the country who may have never received any form of medical treatment before in their lives, allowing them to live a life with many more opportunities.