In the last years my life has been marked by some profound changes. After studying to become a robotics engineer and earning a master’s degree, I pivoted towards medical informatics with my first job. Roughly two years ago, I finally decided to change my career entirely. Now I am back at university and studying Medicine to eventually become a doctor in a few years (hopefully).
Writing down these sentences sounds like a matter-of fact statement. But it has been a rocky path – filled with doubts, hesitation, and also grief. When people learn about my career change, they often promptly ask me why. Usually, my answer goes something along the line of “I didn’t want to work in an office anymore.” This is not a false statement. But it conveys only a very limited fraction of my true motivation and feelings. The honest answer goes way deeper.
Throwback to June 2019: I graduated from TUM with a master’s degree in computer science and took up a PhD position at ScaDS.AI, one of Germany’s top research centers for Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. My time in academia turned out rather disappointing: there was no big meaningful question to answer but rather a collection of loosely coupled projects under the umbrella term AI. The primary goal for research seemed to be obtain ever more funding. Additionally, when I looked at most of the real-world applications of the technology we were working on, it rarely looked like technology for the people. Rather, it was there to improve the recommendation algorithms of Big Tech or would find its way onto the battlefield.
For me, this still is and was a tough pill to swallow. I have invested a very considerable stake of my life into technology, both as a profession but also as part of my identity. And as naive as it sounds, part of my motivation to be the tech guy was indeed to make the world a better place. I believed that science was apolitical and research objectively moral and good no matter what the subject is. This worldview, my worldview, was deconstructed.
Still, I didn’t yet entirely break with tech but took up a software engineering position with a local startup in hospital IT. After the mere theoretical applications in academia, the problems were very much real. We launched a new software for quality management together with a large hospital. This was very much hands-on and I learned a lot along the way: modern web technology, network and cloud infrastructure as well as project and team management. Also, the colleagues were great. But after some time, doubts and discontent came creeping back up. I disliked the pressure to grow because the company was a venture capital financed startup. We were at the mercy of mysterious potential investors with whom I had no relation with. That did not feel right to me.
Additionally, most of the clients were not in Germany and the business felt very much disconnected from Leipzig, the city I am living in. After a little more than two years, the company ran into financial troubles and it was a good time for me to find a new job. In the end, I settled for the IT department of the University Hospital Leipzig (UKL). It is the largest hospital in the region and has around eight thousand employees. I chose this workplace because it has a very direct local purpose which serves the people. There is no investor and no imperative to grow. The UKL very much aligns with my answer to the question of what does the world need (and what not).
With around one hundred people, the IT department is a central pillar of the hospital and involved in almost all processes from patient care to internal logistics. I had before worked as an external supplier for different hospitals so it was interesting to switch sides. During the onboarding process, I had to do a first aid reanimation course which was conducted by an experienced intensive care nurse and included a lot of practical exercises. Afterwards I realized that this training was one of the most fun working days in the last years. Maybe I would actually prefer being the one delivering medical care instead of the IT guy?
This was not a completely new thought. Already since some years, it had been in the back of my mind and also influenced my decision to move my IT career closer to healthcare. In the end, I decided to give it a try and applied for medical studies in Leipzig. Luckily, I got offered a place. Now it was time to decide: Would I really want to start all over again in my early thirties? My answer was “yes” for a couple of reasons: First, being a doctor is firmly rooted in the physical world. I can and must use my full body with all senses compared to sitting at a desk and staring into a monitor most of the time. Second, social interactions with people from all walks of life are part of the job. I like talking to people from different backgrounds. Third, being a doctor is a useful skill in all future scenarios. Capitalism is wreaking havoc on our planet and it is possible that our current societal system will change within our lifetime. I don’t believe in magical technological fixes anymore which give us endless growth. The transition to whatever comes next will be rocky and filled with uncertainty. Consequently, choosing a versatile and hands-on profession makes sense to me. This might surprise some people to hear but it is definitely part of my honest answer to the why question.
Deciding to change my career was one of the toughest decisions I took in my life. I am pretty sure that there would have been also other paths for a meaningful life. Ultimately, I am just happy that I took one of them.