People occasionally ask why, if I'm this interested in medicine, I didn't just go to medical school. It's a fair question, and I've had a few years now — most recently during a quiet stretch of my internship here in Singapore — to sit with the answer.
The ward that changed the question
In October 2023, I spent fifty-plus hours in the Hematology Department at Semmelweis University Hospital in Budapest, under Prof. Péter Farkas. I measured blood pressure and oxygen levels, helped determine patients' blood types, and watched staff make decisions I hadn't fully appreciated from the outside — like how you prioritise blood transfusions when supply doesn't match demand. I left with a much clearer sense of what medicine actually asks of the people who practice it: long shifts, difficult trade-offs, and a kind of decision-making under pressure that no textbook prepares you for.
What stayed with me wasn't just the human side of it, though — it was a more specific, nagging observation. So much of what limits good medicine isn't a lack of clinical judgment. It's a lack of tools: better ways to detect disease earlier, better interfaces between damaged nervous systems and the technology that could support them. The doctors I shadowed were excellent at working within the constraints they had. I kept wondering who was working on loosening those constraints in the first place.
Choosing the bridge instead of a side
That's the real reason I chose Life Sciences Engineering at EPFL over medical school — not because I loved medicine less, but because I wanted to understand both the clinical problem and the technical toolkit deeply enough to actually connect them, rather than specialising into just one half of that bridge. Medical school would have given me the clinical side. A pure engineering degree would have given me the technical side. I wanted both, even if it meant a slower, less conventional path.
In practice, that's meant spending a summer in a cognitive neuroscience lab studying the mechanisms behind memory and agency, and now spending part of this year inside a neurorehabilitation robotics company in Singapore, watching how research findings actually turn — or fail to turn — into devices that help someone recover motor function after a stroke. Both sides keep correcting each other. The lab teaches me what's mechanistically true; the engineering side teaches me what's actually buildable and usable by someone in pain, on a deadline, with limited resources.
Where it's heading
The long-term plan is neurosurgery and neurotechnology, treated as one coherent goal rather than two competing ones — operating on the brain, and building the tools that extend what that operation can do. It's a twenty-year plan, which sounds unreasonable when I say it out loud. I've come to think that's usually a sign the goal is worth having.
I don't know yet exactly what shape that takes — an MD after this degree, a PhD alongside it, some hybrid that doesn't have a clean label yet. But the hematology ward in Budapest is still the clearest answer I have for why I'm on this path at all: I saw what medicine needed, and I wanted to be someone who could actually build it, not just practice within its limits.