How to Break Into Tech with a Health Sci Degree: Interview with Ana Han

Welcome to the Invite Health newsletter. This is a newsletter for those figuring out what to do with a life sciences / health sciences degree. We share stories of students pursuing careers in healthcare, and the experiential learning opportunities they've had. From stem cell research to KPMG consulting to public health, my goal with this newsletter is to introduce you to the various pathways that students can pursue in healthcare (and beyond)!

Whether you’re reading this on a commute, during your study break, or from the comfort of your own home, I hope you enjoy reading today’s newsletter.

- Sachi

This week, I invited one of my friends from undergrad, Ana Han, to share her story on how she pivoted from health sciences to computer science & software engineering. Today’s highlights include:

• Every step Ana took to break into computer science with a health science background → Ana shares lots of resources for students who want to follow this path!

• How Ana landed positions at prestigious companies and institutions, including Microsoft, Coinbase, and Amgen Canada

• How Ana’s journey has taken her around the globe, including Toronto, San Francisco, Paris, and Los Angeles!

P.S. This newsletter may be clipped by your email platform. Open this email in your browser for a better reading experience!

How to Break Into Tech with a Health Sci Degree: Interview with Ana Han

First off, tell us about your journey so far. Where do you study, what inspired you to pursue this, and what’s next? What else do you like to do outside of studying?

Hi everyone, my name is Ana Han, and my pronouns are she/her. I studied in the Health Sciences program at McMaster University. My inspiration for this was multifaceted, if not extremely cliche. 

I was initially very interested in neuroscience. When I was in high school, I was really interested in how the brain worked. While I did not care very much for the relationship between the different organ systems or other aspects of healthcare/medicine, the brain to me stood out as unique. Ours is highly developed compared to other animals, and is highly complex. It’s absolutely terrifying how neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s can be devastating to the human condition; we don’t know enough about how our brains work to stop these tragedies. Luckily for myself, I found out about the Neuroscience 101 Lecture Series for High School Students hosted by the CPIN (Collaborative Program in Neuroscience) Graduate School department at the University of Toronto, which I commuted to in order to learn about a new topic of neuroscience every week. I loved every moment of this (even if I didn’t understand every lecture 100%), and would highly recommend this program for students who are interested in neuroscience or in biology as a whole.

I also excelled at biology and chemistry, and I had a mentorship-like relationship with those teachers, which may have sublimated in my mind to pursue a biomedical career, since I wasn’t sure of what else to do. During my last year of high school, I applied to a mixture of Life/Health Sciences, Math, and some biomedical engineering programs. I recall my rationale was that I really wanted to become a biomedical engineer because I wanted to make devices that would positively impact people’s lives, and I wanted to become a creator/innovator, as I’ve always dreamed of building things other people could not. However, I ended up forcing myself to pursue medical school and becoming a physician when my parents rebutted my engineering-related career choices, and suggested I apply to Health Sciences (and Math as a backup). My parents had always told me that I had to become a doctor and I was blind to other options/afraid to go against their wishes, because I did not have a sense of other things that I would have preferred career wise. So, I accepted Health Sciences over other programs because I thought I was going to become a doctor and needed to maximize my chances of getting into medical school. It was just a pragmatic career choice. However, I like to think that wherever I studied, and wherever I went, was really a coin flip, and I could have pursued anything else, had I been exposed to more interests and experiences when I was younger. That’s why today, I try to do the most I can to open up the full picture of my future endeavors/possibilities, instead of seeing just a glimpse.

Outside of school, I love doing archery, rock climbing, baking, visiting hidden food spots, reading, and catching up on world events. I consider myself a global citizen, having traveled to a couple of places and met people from around the world. I strive to keep myself educated and compassionate towards people in different situations. I aspire to become more of a creator, synthesizing and sharing my thoughts with the world, similar to you.

You pivoted from Health Sci to Software Engineering and Tech! You’ve also worked for big tech companies like Microsoft and Coinbase. Can you walk us through how you made this decision to pivot, and explain some of your experiences / involvements in tech?

So first off, I'd like to say that the intersection between the health/life sciences sphere, and technology, is a lot bigger than some people might think. Tech is super relevant! When it comes to biomedical research, we use computer simulations for many different applications. These include neuroimaging, protein discovery/modeling, epidemic growth, biostatistics (shoutout Russ, the most amazing prof for stats and epidemiology!), neuron firing, clinical healthcare data management, and all sorts of complex biological processes.

This intersection, along with being an avid “hackathon” attendee (I’ve attended hackathons such as DeltaHacks, THacks, Hack the North, CalHacks, to name a few), allowed me to “pivot” into software engineering. Hackathons are typically 24-36 hour long “building competitions” revolving around computer science. You team up with 2-3 others and build a cool app or project to demo to judges at the end. In between, there are mentoring sessions, speed friending, workshops, and usually lots of free food. It’s a great way to make friends and mentors. Also, some hackathons offer travel reimbursements so you won’t be limited to just your city. I’m going to Treehacks 2024 at Stanford this weekend! Here’s a great website to find some near you (or even across the world) to attend! 

On the other hand, I also had more formal experiences involving biotech. The March prior to starting undergrad, I went on the University of Toronto website and searched for faculty in neuroscience / computational neuroscience, and cold emailed around 100 professors. I explained that I had strong grades in Chemistry/Biology and interest in neuroscience, as well as a programming background (I had done 1 hackathon and a computer science course at this point). I then asked to shadow or intern in their labs, really, whatever they were open to. While I am not a fan of unpaid internships/shadowing, I also had no experience and was willing to “work” for free. I firmly believe that all labor should be paid for, but I acknowledge that as a high school student, I had no experience or much knowledge of biology research, and thus likely wouldn’t bring many tangible contributions for the lab given that I would probably be watching someone do work rather than doing work.

Around 20 people responded to my emails. While most rejected me with a “Sent from my iPad” (don’t take it to heart if this happens). I eventually met with and got involved with the labs of 3 people. One was under Dr. Etay Hay, who researches cortical circuit activity (aka modeling neurons using computer programming) at the Krembil Center for Neuroinformatics in Toronto, and hugely drove my interest in mathematics+programming and using a computer-model based approach to study the brain. Originally during our first meeting/interview together, Dr. Hay suggested I apply for an NSERC USRA ($6000 grant) to do some sort of summer project and get paid, however if I recall correctly, the dates for NSERC had passed and/or I wasn’t eligible due to being in high school. So, I ended up volunteering. I would commute to the office 2x a week from June-August and work from 10-5PM on creating new modeling tools. 

The other 3 days I was not in office, I was working on scripting a genome bank for Dr. Matthieu Schapira at MaRS Discovery District just down the street. Dr. Schapira studies structural chemistry of drug target classes, essentially studying the structures of different biological receptors and how well they can bind drugs/molecules. I was responsible for mapping out some of the binding relationships through creating a database. While I was not paid, my name was put on the paper that was released as a result of this (not first or second author).

Lastly, during the last two weeks of summer, I found some time to shadow at the lab of Dr. Jean Chen, Tier II Canada Research Chair in Neuroimaging of Aging. I was working on analysing neuroimaging data (MRI), which is essentially a way of using non-invasive radiology to study the structure and functional activity of your brain. In particular, I looked at diffusion MRI, which uses the differential diffusion of water in restricted compartments such as the lengths of neurons, to give microscopic details of brain tissue architecture. This was not paid either - I was mostly learning about the type of research done at the lab and just playing around with MRI and learning how to manipulate it. However, when Covid hit in March 2020, I reached out asking for a summer research job essentially. For the summer of 2020, I believe I received a stipend from Jean that was comparable to the amount of an NSERC USRA grant, around $6000, although I don’t remember the exact number. This summer project was a solo project that gave me a lot of autonomy - it involved a lot of data processing, scripting, statistical analysis and technical troubleshooting, all of which are very translatable skills into a software engineering career - you break down research problems into smaller subsets and solve those. 

Due to the fact it was a solo project and there was a lot of work to do, it became part of a 2-3 year long research project where I investigated the use of a new computer based framework to analyze diffusion MRI images in healthy aging populations. After the first paid summer, I worked as a paid part time assistant for my second year. My contract was for around 10 hrs/week, at slightly above minimum wage. Then, I took a break for the summer of second year (more below). In my third and fourth years, I believe I used the project for a project research course and my thesis project at McMaster and got course credit (equivalent to 2/5ths of my total semester course load) instead of pay. 

However, while I was kicking off my research career at Jean’s lab, I became increasingly disillusioned with myself and how my parents had influenced my “pragmatic career choice” of medicine - which I had only gone along with because I had good grades in my chem/bio courses. For this reason, I distanced myself, and did not see myself fitting in other Health Science students - many of whom would seemingly pursue endless extracurriculars to simply pad their medical school applications. I was more inspired by students who pursued their passions in biology, despite the crowds around them, like you (Sachi) and the people who run Nucleate Dojo. 

I am someone who wants to make an impact. While some students may be jealous of those who get into medical school, I was jealous of my friends studying computer science who were traveling to California and drinking pandan matcha lattes at Google (Quinn you won’t read this, but can you please bring me to a Google cafeteria someday?). Taking a step back, I recalled that in high school, I had enjoyed solving algorithm questions at my high school’s programming Club, where senior students had taught me programming languages like Java and how to solve problems using it. I had also competed in the Canadian Computing Competition, a competition to solve the most computer science problems with the most correct and efficient solutions, kind of like the Waterloo Euclid Math contest, but for programming. 

So, I decided to take my research skills that I gained from doing computational research at Jean’s lab, and transition into the computer science industry in my second year of university. I was really interested in doing more bio-computation problems, which I define as problems that model biological processes using mathematics or computational models. For example, at what rate does a neuron fire? How can we model the diffusion of different molecules across membranes or inside a cell? How many metagenomic samples are required to construct an entire genome? 

At some point, a friend who was part of the same club (McMaster Artificial Intelligence Society) referred me to the Magarvey Lab at McMaster. This lab studied natural products (think antibiotics or other useful molecules produced by organisms like bacteria) via machine learning. Machine Learning is an approach which involves creating algorithms/data processes capable of simulating the human act of learning a specific task (for example, a computer may learn a specific task, which is to recognize ASL letters from hand pictures). I was working on a project to predict which bacterial genes were responsible for causing bacteria to make natural products, for example new generations of antibiotics that are effective against bacterial strains like MRSA, a type of staph. Aureus bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics and can cause infection and illness in humans. I learned a lot about machine learning and data science there. I imagine that experience is not unlike being an ML scientist in tech, but with added smells of yeasty bacterial growth medium since we were in a lab. Delish.

Shortly thereafter, I applied for this program at Microsoft called the Explore Internship, a 12 week summer software engineering/program management internship in Seattle, Washington (although I did it remote due to COVID). It is specifically targeted towards 1st and 2nd year students. The program is highly selective, admitting around 300 students, i.e. 1-2% of applicants. Applicants are on the Microsoft website, and screened via resume from around August to December before the summer of Explore, i.e. August 2024 for an internship that takes place starting May 2025. Applications are rolling, with most positions gone by December. Those whose resumes pass initial selection will then go through 2 interview stages. The first is a phone screen interview (15 minute phone call behavioral interview where you are asked situational questions), and 1 technical interview where you have an hour to solve an algorithm-based question in front of a software engineer, and then another hour for another question with another engineer.  I had never done a “tech” interview before, but there are many resources, specifically this Github that helped prepare me for a typical interview with behavioral questions, as well as data structures/algorithms-based questions. While I did not fully solve my second question in the technical interview, I believe I communicated my problem solving approach well, and I was accepted to my surprise. Admittedly, my experience at Microsoft was admittedly sad because it was fully virtual and I would have liked to work on a more biotech or research-based team. That being said, it was a good experience into the day-to-day of working at a larger tech company and gave me experience of the product development cycle, as well as using best practices and CI/CD pipeline tools (tools that control the release of a developer’s code into the production version that the public uses) that I had never used as a solo programmer/researcher in academia. My project was to develop a safety feature to turn off a specific engine in Microsoft Edge, that would reduce the brower’s susceptibility to potential hackers/exploits. I also interviewed potential users of the feature as a Program Manager, essentially overseeing the development of the feature/project. My responsibility was to help to better develop the feature’s design and execution, which I did by conducting surveys and user research interviews. On the engineering side, I was able to get mentorship from more experienced engineers as I developed the feature, and that was really helpful, making me become more confident in my skills as a software engineer. 

Also, Olivia Rodrigo came one day and sang for us! I wasn’t even that much of a fan back then, but I should have taken a picture, oops.

The summer after, in between my 3rd and 4th year, I was caught between returning to Microsoft, or leaning into my research dreams at the Amgen Scholars Program, a 12 week biomedical research program (Full details of my Amgen experience are in the next question). I’d wanted to apply to Amgen since my first year, wanting to do research with a competitive Amgen neuroscience lab (who had rejected me 2 times previously). I also knew it would help me get into an MD-PhD (a six-seven year combined medical school and doctorate grad school program), something I was considering, so I was highly split between the two.

The TL;DR is that I chose to do Amgen over Microsoft because 1) once you work at one big tech company, it’s easier to get to the next, but 2) Amgen was a dream and a once in a lifetime experience. Ultimately, I was unable to give up on the dreams of an 18-year old me and decided to go for the summer research experience. Would I recommend this? I don’t know. I think so, but ask me in 5 years.

While I enjoyed my experience with the Amgen Scholar’s Program, I ultimately felt it was a bad fit, and I left academia (my heart is with the lab still). While I loved my neuroscience work, I knew I would not take my background in health sciences to become a doctor, yet I did not see a future where I could be a professor/lead my own lab in neuroscience research. It was not for me. It feels rare for academics to get the recognition and compensation they deserve (shoutout to Nucleate Dojo and Michael Trinh for working to change that), and at times it seems that the insights they derive from their research are not translated or communicated onto a wider scale, limiting the overall impact of all their hard work. In some ways I’m skeptical of the role of academia, which feels like a cannibalistic ecosystem where small tidbits of knowledge are created and consumed, but is yet self-contained, rarely making enough significance to leave the benchside and enter industry where it makes its way to the general population, especially if your research is not “ground-breaking”.

Ultimately I wandered around, both literally and figuratively. I didn’t really know about any other careers directly related to the degree I studied. I briefly considered doing consulting after seeing I loved mathematics and machine learning too much to go back to pure tech. I ended up interning and working full time at Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange company. I applied for the internship in January of 2023, 3 months prior to the start of it, as I happened to see the posting on LinkedIn. After submitting my resume, I was invited to fill out a personality-based screening questionnaire (around 40-50 questions) and a CodeSignal General Coding Assessment, a fairly industry-typical asynchronous test consisting of 4 algorithm-based questions. After completing these, I heard back 3 weeks later with an invitation for a virtual 1 hour interview with an engineer, where I was asked some questions about my resume, and 1 technical question. I heard back and got an offer 1 week later for a 16 week (you can choose between 12 and 16 weeks) remote paid internship (although there is a Toronto office), and the hourly pay was $50 CAD. I loved my experience as it allowed me to fulfill my love for numbers. I was able to take a more active role by launching an analytics platform for NFTs/non-fungible tokens, which are unique pieces of digital media that live on a blockchain. This platform provides data similar to the financial information that you see on the stock market, and that was really exciting. To see something come more to life and know that others can see what you’ve done and gain value out of it. Also, I’ve never been to the Bay Area and they flew us out to San Francisco for an offsite to meet other interns, which was super fun. Overall, I’m really excited about the future - I received an offer to come back as a Software Engineer 2 months after I graduated and I’m now working full time on our mission to include more people in the financial system.

Other tech related involvements - I am highly involved in the hackathon community - I ran my own artificial-intelligence based hackathon MacHacks in Hamilton for 2 years and I am a speaker/mentor/judge for other hackathons (I recently judged at DeltaHacks X at McMaster University)! Please let me know if you want me to judge/speak/etc at your event! I’m also trying to host my own hacker house soon, so stay tuned. Lastly, I'm also volunteering as a sponsorship director for Out for Undergrad, which is an LGBTQ2IA career development conference for queer high achieving students. We host 3 conferences a year - I’m involved in the digital (combo of tech + marketing) branch which takes place in September 2024 in New York City, but we have a conference for engineering/life sciences (September 2024, Minneapolis), and a business conference (March 2024, New York City) as well. Our conferences typically span Friday-Saturday and include different types of programming like speakers, workshops, networking, mentorship, etc, to help queer students achieve their full potential. This conference changed my life and if you’re queer, I highly encourage you to apply and meet other queer folks who are living your dream.

You also took an exchange in France during undergrad! Can you tell us a bit more about that experience?

In grade 10, my mom treated me to my first and only vacation. In Paris. We went for 3 days, and she complained for 3 days while I was admiring the views of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs D’Elysees. It killed the mood. She also did not let us try steak tartare because she was afraid we would get food poisoning.

Then, In my first year, my friend Andrew, president and fellow member of the McMaster Artificial Intelligence Society, was talking about how he did math research in Paris. I love math and I love Paris. It’s a very liveable city, with great architecture, transportation, food, and weather (I was wearing a t-shirt in January once). Even the air feels different. So, I was reminded that I had to go back (and get my steak tartare obviously). I decided to take a master's of computer science course at Sorbonne University, which is a) fairly well ranked for CS, and b) really close to the river Seine (I love the Seine). I loved my experience at Sorbonne - campus is beautiful and easy to navigate. I tried to mix courses across different Master’s programs as there were some interesting anatomy courses offered, but ultimately that proved too hard logistically, and I ended up choosing courses mostly from the Digital International Master’s of Computer Science, which encompasses bioinformatics, computer networking, image processing, quantum information, security, etc. I took courses on machine learning and the complexity of computer models - diving deeper into concepts I would never be able to take at McMaster, especially at the Bachelor’s level. I also took a fencing course for credit. Apparently you can even take a skiing course if you’re in Grenoble or elsewhere in the French Alps!

To be honest, the first weeks were very difficult. Course registration in France is a nightmare and I don’t think I could do it again. Definitely prepare 100% in advance, especially if you want to take any electives like I did. I was also very stressed about graduating and figuring out what I wanted to do after, while simultaneously being scared I was not going to make friends since I am introverted and did not speak French well. Ultimately though, it was very easy to meet others in my international student residence, especially once I embraced meeting others from different cultures, and I left Paris with many warm memories and love for all those I spent time with. Highlights were making friends from around the world, exploring the rock climbing scene in Paris, discovering the thousands of types of French cheeses, and making vin chaud (mulled wine) and crepes every week. Also, French bread and patisserie is unparalleled. 

I also took some time to travel. I paraglided in Switzerland, strolled along the canals of Amsterdam, and ate frites in Brussels, so it was pretty worth it, to say the least. I’m still bad at French though, as expected. In summary, 10/10 best experience of my life.

You were a student in the prestigious Amgen Canada program! Can you walk us through your experience?

In September 2019 I was looking for different research programs, and the Amgen Scholars Program must have been listed on a Google Search - upon glancing at their website, it seemed like this very prestigious program at the University of Toronto which was essentially a 10-week summer research experience (13 May - 19 July 2024), where you get matched with a biomedical lab and a specific project. The program includes campus housing (this was at Wilcocks Residence at the University of Toronto, FYI we did not have private bathrooms nor working fridges/kitchens), travel to Toronto, a food stipend ($100/wk), and a $6K stipend is provided, and there is also amazing programming like a speaker series and weekly social events with the research cohort (we went to Ripley’s, CN Tower, a Blue Jay’s game, Centre Island, and an escape room at Casa Loma). It’s an amazing program that will help prepare you for graduate school. Also, at the end of the program, you get to fly out to present your research at Symposium at the University of California Los Angeles (or Singapore if you’re in Asia), and network with other scholars. Honestly, I was initially interested because I saw there were Amgen Scholar’s programs in Asia, and I wanted to do research in Japan.

The program is open to undergrads who do not graduate before the program starts. The application consists of your CV/curriculum vitae/resume, undergraduate transcripts, and 2 reference letters in addition to an application form, where you explain your interest in biomedical research and which lab out of the available labs that you’d like to be paired with. Although you do not need research experience to be considered, I noticed that around 60% of the cohort had some form of research experience or biomedical job experience before joining. I would say that compared to having a research experience year round at university, the length of the program made it harder to produce results since your research had to be crammed into 10 weeks, so the program serves more as an introduction to research, than a way to get a major project or paper out. I applied with my first choice to work in Dr. Michael Fehling’s lab at the Toronto Western Hospital. Dr. Fehlings works on neural regeneration, which is the re-synthesis of neural tissue, particularly of the spinal cord, to replace the tissue that is damaged due to injury/trauma. This is something I was hugely excited about, being interested in neuroscience. This type of research is not really available at McMaster and Dr. Fehlings is also a leading neurosurgeon, so I was excited for the cross-collaboration between benchside and clinical practice. I had previously applied to his lab through a cold email, and also several other research programs, only to become rejected, so I was very excited to apply to his lab through Amgen as I thought it would give me a better chance of getting into his lab as an undergrad. I also applied to the lab of Daniel Felsky, an interdisciplinary lab which uses machine learning and statistical approaches to study population level mental health via biomarkers, genetics, neuroimaging, etc, to build on my previous research exp (see Q2) with Dr. Hay, as they worked in adjacent research groups. I had a razor sharp focus on neuroscience at the time, so I picked all neuroscience related professors for my choice of project, but I only remember these two. I think explaining my focus/interest and my clear idea of what I wanted to do in terms of neuroscience research helped me get in.

My research experience itself was investigating and optimizing different experiments related to factors of neural stem cells (neural progenitor cells) that could regenerate after traumatic injury. In practice, this meant doing lots of imaging, staining, and slicing of rat/mouse spinal cord tissue. Our goal was to optimize and test expression of GDNF (glial derived neurotrophic factor), a protein that can enhance the ability of regenerated neurons to survive. We used PCRs (polymerase chain reaction) to determine how expression changes over time, so we can regulate it better in neural transplants post-traumatic injury in spinal cord tissue. It’s important that neural transplant therapy is well received in humans and does not reject/become ineffective after some time. It was nice to be exposed to different techniques in biomedical research and to get experience working with animals as model organisms. You get to see more of the impact of your work since you are working in-vivo (testing on a whole organism as opposed to the cell or tissue). For example, we would make rats with induced spinal cord injury and neural stem cell transplants do a walk test aka catwalk, to evaluate their ability to recover motor function. A note that animal work in research is not to be taken lightly - it can be traumatizing as our lab required us to intentionally inflict harm on them in order to test the impacts of stem cell transplant therapy. It made me quite grateful for all the scientific discoveries we have today that countless animals have been sacrificed for. 

A side note: it is difficult to get your research project “completed” in 10 weeks. In between Symposium (3 days in August, you travel to UCLA and present your research + network with scholars from Amgen campuses in the US) and weekly lecture series (Wednesdays), ramping up to the type of work a lab does (specific techniques and research area) can be difficult due to time constraints. This led to some weekends and late nights in the lab. It’s important therefore, to coordinate with your principal investigator/PI and make sure you know what you’re going to be working on before you even join. I’d recommend really diving deep into the specific papers and research your lab works on to get a good idea of what you’ll work on. However, overall I would still highly recommend the program if you are an undergraduate interested in graduate school, or working in the biomedical industry, due to the multitude of networking opportunities and the invaluable research experience it provides.

Some highlights: definitely going to LA for the Amgen North America symposium, and chilling at Santa Monica Pier. Also biking to Amgen Socials in the summer. A non-highlight is In-N-Out Burger in LA (the animal fries were covered in waayy too much sauce and the burger was a bit tasteless). Lastly, UCLA campus is beautiful and I wish Canadian universities would be half as picturesque.

How do you think your background in health sciences impacted your career in tech? What’s next for you?

So far, my health sciences background has impacted my career by allowing me to transition from computational biology research to pure computer science, although it doesn’t have a super heavy hand in my day to day as a software engineer. 

I recently revisited San Francisco, and I’m reinspired to change directions in my career again. In the Bay, I was constantly seeing young people pivot careers and focusing on things they were passionate for, regardless if they had formal education or background in it. In particular, AI safety is something that I’ve been interested in, and I think I could revisit the machine learning and statistical portion of my undergrad by working as a machine learning engineer. As well, I think that in the future the research portion of health sciences will be much more impactful in tech as I hope to leverage my research experience to pivot towards AI safety research/policy. I think that there are a lot of very useful investigative skills that we gain in health sciences, taking courses such as Health Policy and our research practicums in 3rd and 4th years. These prepare us by making us read different papers that are helpful in thinking of hypotheses to test when we create new models in technology. Especially when our current models are not well understood and can bring harm if not used properly, I’m certain the investigative lens that Health Sciences has given will help me transition from evaluating health systems to AI systems in the future. In parallel, I’m also interested in working more on tech policy as I want to make a global impact on the future of our technology from a safety and regulation perspective. Lastly, I’m also open to biotech as a career path- I never thought I would be the type of person to start my own company or startup, but my appetite for risk has definitely increased over the years and I know I can leverage my background to innovate the future of health technology via a future startup.

Where can students go if they want to learn more about your experiences? 

You can find my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hana11. Feel free to ask me questions there. I’m also part of a server called Tech Career change North on Discord, it’s pretty much what it sounds like, for students who want to pivot to a tech career. I didn't have this resource when I was a student but I think that it's worth looking at, especially if you finished a Health or Life Sciences degree and you're thinking of pivoting into something else.

Is there anything else that you would like to add for Invite Health readers?

Always follow your passion - it’s okay to take risks and do dumb stuff. Especially being young, you have a lot of time to try out everything you want to do. Also, you might feel that you make mistakes - no mistake can be “corrected”, only reflected upon and accepted, and then you move on to better things. Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of your network and the people you know. Everyone’s voice matters.

Next Week on Invite Health 💌 

I share my conversation with Harshini Ramesh (she/her), a Policy Analyst at the Government of Canada, who works in the International Affairs Branch of Environment and Climate Change Canada. In other words, she represents Canada’s climate interests on the global stage.

Harshini is also a graduate of McMaster’s Bachelor of Health Sciences (BHSc) Program and of McGill’s Max Bell School of Public Policy, with a Master of Public Policy (MPP).

Harshini’s story will be shared next week on Invite Health.

In the Community 👩🏻‍💻

• Follow Invite Health’s new Instagram page! @readinvitehealth

• UNICEF Leading Minds Fellowship on Climate (paid)

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• Power Your Education Scholarship for Canadian Students ($7,500)

• Read last week’s newsletter with Isabelle Linden:

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