Update: I was just admitted to the Master's Program in Management Science & Engineering on 3/4/2016! Some of you might be wondering why I'm pursuing a second graduate degree on top of a coterminal master's degree in Computer Science. Thankfully, I've already taken the time to write an entire statement of purpose to explain myself - check it out below if you're curious:
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My reasons for pursuing a second graduate degree in Management Science & Engineering are to build strengths as a product strategist and a leader of fast-moving organizations. Interested particularly in the concentrations for Technology and Engineering Management and Health Systems Modeling, I hope to train my ability to develop coherent strategies in the midst of uncertainty, and to lead technical teams that execute those strategies specifically at the intersection of healthcare and technology.
While studying computer science at Stanford, I’ve learned how to design, prototype, and build products. Now, I want to take a step back and ask bigger questions: what products to build, how products fit into the landscape, and when a product is ready for the market. Taking MS&E 270 has given me a good taste of what this process looks like for companies from a bird-eye’s view, but getting hands-on entrepreneurial experience by taking classes like MS&E 273 and MS&E 271 will give me tools to discover, realize, and then market ideas to the world.
Coursework and experiences as a former premedical student have given me a lasting appreciation of the medical field and a desire to make positive changes in our healthcare system. I would be especially interested in taking classes like MS&E 257 and MS&E 463 to identify high-impact needs in healthcare and train an intuition to address them with technology.
Across all of these classes, I’m especially curious to learn from other students in the MS&E department. Classes like MS&E 280 and MS&E 274, which center around case studies and peer-led discussions, allow the opportunity to learn from the collective knowledge of peers who share my passion for tackling and addressing compelling issues.
During my time at Stanford, I’ve worked across education and healthcare on a legacy of projects and organizations that I’ve been fortunate to be a part of:
At Khan Academy, I learned how an ambitious mission can be tackled with well-defined products and well-scoped projects. During my summer tenure with the company, I designed and developed key features (i.e. offline infrastructure, featured content) from scratch to help just under a million students from all around the world access high-quality education.
Building products with Muvr Labs and Olive Health gave me a chance to attempt defining and scoping products and projects at early-stage ventures. I built and iterated on MVPs through continuous cycles of feedback to product high-quality mobile applications that were a major part of obtaining seed funding.
In starting and directing SHIFT (Stanford Health Innovations in Future Technologies) and TreeHacks Health, I’ve learned how to realize concrete steps from lofty vision statements. Through these organizations, I’m determined to leave a legacy of students empowered to tackle problems and explore innovations at the intersection of healthcare and technology. Through SHIFT, I’ve started a project fellowship that empowers interdisciplinary teams of students every quarter to actively explore innovative projects with industry and faculty sponsors. At TreeHacks Health, we’re bringing high-impact problems and needs in the healthcare and health sector to the most talented student developers, designers, and makers. Over just 36 hours, we hope to empower these teams with a warchest of technical resources spanning wearable devices to anonymized datasets. Beyond just the weekend of the hackathon, our vision is to inspire a generation of students to begin breaking down the barriers to a sector that deeply needs innovation.
This quarter, I was accepted to MS&E 280, 271, and Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad course with a team that is eagerly exploring market fit of a mobile-based microscopy application that can distinguish between bacterial and viral diseases. I continue to actively pursuing my interest in developing teams and products as a Course Assistant for CS194H (User Experience Design Project), a capstone course for the Human-Computer-Interaction curriculum in the Computer Science department. Outside of class, I also lead product development efforts to help a team of researchers from Sebastian Thrun’s lab consumerize Computer Vision technology that can recognize skin cancer.
Lessons learned from all these experiences have given me a vested interest in the MS&E program and an eager expectation of the value I could gain from an education in MS&E.