Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post. 

Adventures through Working  

By Cecilia Xue (EN ’21)

My name is Cecilia Xue and I’m a rising junior at Washington University. I’m double majoring in Biomedical Engineering and Math, and the summer internship has sparked the idea of minoring finance or business-related subject also. The past two years at Washington University, I’ve mainly taken STEM courses or those that are required for my two majors. Thus, I have had few experiences in a business-related field and haven’t explored all the professional knowledge and work setting.

I’m working in a company called Digital Medical Arts, which aims to increase patient engagement in the consulting process to the physician, through an interactive software that’s available on iPad. The current focus of the medical specialty is limited to urology and I’m responsible for the market and sales-related work for most of the time. As for the DMA company itself, it was founded by a family where father and son (Abe Hawatmeh and Salim Hawatmeh) are urologists and the daughter (CEO, Barbara Hawatmeh Pozzi) has a background in finance and law. Their idea of revolutionizing the patient-physician consulting process actually originated from their daily professional life. Here I’ve gotten the chance to integrate my background in biomedicine and interest in business. I’ve been working with Stephen Von Rump and Seth Krauss, entrepreneur in residence at ITEN and the CTO of the company respectively. Being on such an interdisciplinary team enables me to obtain ideas that are based on different professional fields. After all, the team members have far more life and professional experience than me. I have the chance to learn from them, in terms of work and life.

Entrance to Cortex

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the side of optimizing products and doing analysis on a competitor with similar intention of revolutionizing inquiry process and promote patient engagement. Currently, I mainly focus on the project of gathering urology physicians and residents across the nation for further contact and connection for sales of the software. One feature of the internship that’s special is the ability to allocate working time. Since the work is based in CORTEX, which is an innovation hub based on technology and biological science in St. Louis, there is no private area for working, so I only go there for meetings (usually ~4 hours a day). In this way, even though there is more ‘free time’ for me, as a highly responsible person who is really passionate about the work now, I actually tend to work almost most of the time I’m not in meetings. From my perspective, the freedom and the fantastic working environment in CORTEX truly simulates a higher level of passion for the work and tasks that I’m assigned.

Meeting space in Cortex

Thanks to the summer intern experience, I believe I can be accustomed to and welcome any challenges I come across during the path of future study and work, which are like mysterious adventure game to me, overcoming and conquering, learning and harvesting.