It began with a hackathon. Or maybe it began on a Friday evening after one of those long biomedical engineering labs, when I asked Mikey, who was clearly the smartest student in the class, if he wanted to join me in starting our very own health hackathon. Or perhaps it was the many weekends we spent attending entrepreneurship workshops, the projects I worked on with friends, or the various contentions we had with faculty and students along the way as we scrambled to formulate just exactly what it was we wanted to create. Maybe it was the one interest meeting we had in a dingy classroom in Mason Hall, months before we started doing anything real. Only a few students showed up, but nonetheless, with all my might I pitched my idea for a new kind of community for biomedical innovation. Unbeknownst to us, a few of those silent attendees would later become some of the first devotees of MedLaunch.
So many changes occurred in those early days that it’s difficult to say when MedLaunch, that is the MedLaunch you see today, truly began.
In a way, it began with all these things. And yet, it seemed to have begun long before that. It began with a hunger that started before any one of us set foot on campus. An all too present awareness of how short our time in college would be, and an aching desire to do something in the time we would have.
As I finished my sophomore year of college, I still hadn’t built something that I could call my own. I only had two years left to do something, and I wanted to do something big. It didn’t feel like enough time. Surely, I would fail, or else ruin my prospects of success elsewhere. But I knew that if I didn’t try, I would regret it dearly.
That summer, I attended a health hackathon and I met Sujai, who was one year younger than me, but who I quickly realized shared the same fire and desire to create something. Little did I know how large a role he would play in MedLaunch’s creation and its survival after I would be gone. After attending that hackathon, we wanted to create our own health hackathon, but what started as a hackathon soon evolved into something much greater. We wanted to create a community for people passionate about biomedical innovation and design. I started by enlisting my friends from biomedical engineering, Mikey, Ashish and Saswat, all of whom were passionate about biomedical innovation and looking for something to channel their enthusiasm towards. I also recruited my friend Roseanne, an art student, who I knew could make us some cool graphics that would inspire and show others what it was we stood for.
The problem was this kind of community already existed, at least on paper. In the beginning, it was all about how we could be different. With over a thousand student organizations and various programs at the University of Michigan, almost every person we encountered asked us how we were different from the things that already existed. For a while, we struggled with this question. We eventually came up with the idea of the Biodesign Challenge, an annual year-long competition where students work in small teams to solve a pressing healthcare problem.
While the Biodesign Challenge wasn’t a drastic departure from things that already existed at the university, it was different enough for people to stop asking the question of uniqueness. The truth is that whether we were truly different or not was irrelevant to us. We had grown discontent with the other opportunities, the inefficiencies and general lack of inspiration. We felt that there were so many more problems and technologies that students could be working on in the biomedical space that were currently not being addressed at the university. We thought that the other things people were working on were boring and lacking an edge. What we cared about was being better than the alternatives. We wanted to create a place where you could achieve your full creative potential, where young artists and engineers could join forces to design beautiful technologies. What we longed for more than anything was a sense of belonging and a chance to connect with others over the shared experience of building something greater than ourselves.
Above all, we simply wanted to create something that we could call our own. To be able to point and say, we made this.
With such lofty goals and expectations, when it came to actually getting started, we froze up. Rather than start building right away, we kept ideating, refining our mission statement, and pitching our Biodesign Challenge to organizations that could potentially give us money. I wanted us to work on something big, like cancer-big, something so ambitious and inspiring that it would summon the masses. The only problem was, we knew that we couldn’t tackle something that big. Institutions and corporations pour billions of dollars into solving big healthcare problems, and they’ve barely made a dent. We were trying to bite off more than we could chew. But this whole thing had to be perfect.
I was so obsessed with this idea of what MedLaunch could be that I seemed to forget what MedLaunch was, that is, it was nothing at all. I seemed to like the idea of MedLaunch more than the actual work of making it happen. This went on for about the entirety of my junior year, until it hit us at the end of the summer. Our goal was to run the first Biodesign Challenge my senior year, but by the end of that summer before my senior year we had next to nothing prepared. We were so close to giving up, to accepting that it was a good thought experiment but it wasn’t going to happen. After all, why should we work so hard on this thing our last year of college, only to leave and never see it again.
We needed to scale back. We needed to start with something small, something specific, something to simply get us going. And then it happened. I remember us sitting in the library one summer evening, all about ready to call it a day, when Sujai walked in and told us that he met a guy named James. James wasn’t just any guy, but a guy with quadriplegia who wanted to create technologies to overcome his own limitations. He had hundreds of ideas but didn’t have the resources to build them. He wanted to work with someone to bring his ideas to life. And there were others like him. It was perfect. We jumped at the opportunity to meet them, and they soon became known to us as our community partners.
We went into that school year with a newfound scrappiness. No longer were we paralyzed by an incessant need for perfection, or holding on to some idea of what MedLaunch was supposed to be. We didn’t need to be perfect. We simply needed to be good enough.
The Biodesign Challenge evolved into less of a competition and more of a collaborative effort between all the teams. Perhaps this was because of our lack of funding that made it difficult to come up with any hefty prizes, but whatever the case, people seemed more driven by the desire to do good than by the incentive of winning an award. We made a lot of mistakes that first year, and we worried about our ability to retain members. But despite those mistakes, people still stuck with us. They believed in what MedLaunch stood for and saw the possibility of what MedLaunch could be. And by the end of that year, we had three prototypes from three teams. Sure, they might not have been masterpieces, but they were something. Something that we could build upon.
I believe that it was this scrappiness, mixed with a healthy dose of foolishness, that kept us going that first year. But it was the early members who fell in love with MedLaunch that carried us forward. Even when faced with the prospect of going remote in only MedLaunch’s third year, they still persisted and oversaw the completion of six working prototypes that consisted of both assistive physical devices and software applications.
As MedLaunch continues to grow and evolve, I’m excited to see the interesting products that students create. At its best, I believe that MedLaunch is a community of earnest people with a shared love for science, technology and human-centered design. It’s a place to play, to tinker and explore, to try and fail, and then to try again.
There is much I still hope to see MedLaunch achieve. I want to see MedLaunch take on bigger and better projects. I want students to build things that truly help others and that they can be proud of. Maybe some teams can even go on to start their own companies and raise millions in funding. But above all, I hope that students can enjoy the ride that being part of such an organization takes you on. For it was the process of taking MedLaunch from nothing to something that I hold most dear. The friendships I made, the lessons I learned. It was those early champions that made MedLaunch what it was and set the groundwork for what it could become. It was James, Jeff and Courtney who invited us into their homes and gave so much of their time to help us build those first prototypes. In spite of the challenges they faced in their daily lives, they brought forth a sense of optimism and resilience that inspired us to do better and keep pushing forward.
And it was my friends, who were willing to take a chance and devote themselves to something that was already a meme to our peers and was likely to fail. I’ll admit, there was no shortage of times when they would frustrate me to no end. I was frequently on Mikey’s case about not doing enough and badgering him to put on this workshop or that. I would consistently bother Ashish about improving the website and would demand of him to do a better job mentoring teams when their progress slowed. And then there was Saswat, who seemed to only show up when he was going to hang out with the girl he was then seeing, who just so happened to live right across the street.
I was forever worrying about the future, while they seemed concerned about nothing but the present. But it was they who actually interacted with the other members and extended their encouragement and enthusiasm. It was they who made the meetings fun. The witty banter, the joking and jostling, albeit I felt they were being unproductive, they countered my solemn demeanor and established a sense of play that got people coming back. While I schemed about the future, they bonded with others and helped them work on their projects, whether it was debugging a problem or pointing a team to the right resources. Especially Mikey, who always seemed to be simultaneously working on none of the projects and all of the projects.
It was Roseanne that understood what we were trying to do and created the most mesmerizing graphics that got us excited and made MedLaunch no longer just an idea, but something tangible. And when Roseanne couldn’t continue working on MedLaunch, she introduced us to Molly, who committed herself wholeheartedly to the organization and churned out beautiful pieces of art on Adobe Illustrator faster than I’d ever seen. And it was Sujai, who despite his reserved disposition, and his willingness to take a back seat so that I could shine in the spotlight, cared more about MedLaunch than anyone else. It was he who sustained the heart and vitality of the organization into the second year and who, to this day, spends more time than anyone else giving back to MedLaunch. It was the commitment of these early believers that gave me the conviction that what we were doing meant something, even if only to a few.
The amalgamation of such characters and the chaos that ensued, that is what I miss the most. Amidst the drowning feeling that we weren’t doing enough, that we weren’t going to be good enough, and finally that we didn’t accomplish enough, I took these things for granted. But I only believe that those things happened because we gave ourselves to this organization and allowed that spirit of play to blossom. I hope that for future MedLaunchers, you can give yourself to MedLaunch like we once did. Because only then will you get out what you seek, and so much more.
