Biomed students build practical skills abroad

"It was an eye-opening experience," said Engineering junior Young Yim of his trip to do bioengineering in southern China this summer with the Engineering school's Global BioMedical Service Program.

Now in its third year, GBS takes a group of 12 students and a faculty member to work on medical problems in China each summer. This program is in collaboration with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

This program mainly attracts Bioengineering students, said Bioengineering professor Daniel Bogen, who accompanied the group in 2006 and 2007.

Bogen said students expressed a desire to apply their classroom knowledge to real-life scenarios, which led to a program that also gives them the opportunity to improve people's lives.

The School of Engineering sponsors the program, but students are required to pay a subsidized fee for the two credits they receive during the program.

Last summer, the students went to Shunde, a small city in the Guangdong province in southern China, where they built orthotics - devices that are used to correct deformities in the way people walk or run - for children.

The three-week trip started in Hong Kong, where the students worked in laboratories and learned how to make the orthotics. After traveling to southern China to take foot measurements of the children, they constructed the orthotics back in Hong Kong. The trip concluded with a final visit to Shunde to install and fit the orthotics to the children.

"Since China does not have a lot of red tape, we could do a lot more with patients than we could do in the U.S.," Yim said.

He added that travelling to a developing country added another dimension to his experience.

"Once you step out of your comfort zone and go to a totally new environment, you start to realize and appreciate how much you actually have," he added.

Orthopedics is a field that is not currently taught in Penn Engineering, Bogen said, so the program gave students access to a new field of bioengineering.

Although the language barrier did restrict complete interaction, Engineering senior Elana Cooper said the families were very warm and appreciative of their work.

"We worked with Chinese students at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, so along with the education and technical experience, it's also a cultural experience," said first-year Medical School student Chia Wu, who was an Engineering senior when he acted as student coordinator for the 2008 trip.

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