A New Kind of Tech

15 year old on blindness, “Why not make new eyes?”

Biomedical engineering. A relatively old idea, but with new technology it is becoming more and more powerful. The idea is that you apply technology to medicine to achieve tasks once thought impossible. For example an artificial arm that can actually feel things or an artificial eye that can see. Isaac Young ’21 wants to become part of this quickly growing field.

Young was born in Iowa City, and he lived in Iowa City for 2 years before he moved to Arkansas for 3 years afterwich his family moved back to Iowa City when his dad got a job at the University of Iowa. He went to Lakeview and Lincoln for elementary school then went to Northwest Jr. High and now he attends West. He has two dogs and likes doing sports like cross country and rock climbing.

When asked about family with experience in robotics Isaac said,”My dad is an engineer, which isn’t super involved in robotics, but still. Other than that I doesn’t know anybody with experience in the field of Robotics.” Despite this, he has a plan for the future. He has been messing around with constructing things for a while now but now he also taking a course in coding so that he can tell the robots what to do and have them fill out basic commands. Coding for those who do not understand is simply put a language that computers follow to function and fill out commands. Mr. Audia, Isaac’s coding teacher, said,”Isaac is a very motivated student and you can tell he wants to learn how to code and be better at it than everyone else.”
Isaac does many things outside of school to learn how to better construct robots, including joining the west high robotics club to learn from some of his peers.

Isaac wants a career in the field of robotics and to do that he will need to go to college and get a degree and likely a graduate degree as well. His friend Ethan Buck ‘21 said about this,”Isaac knows that this stuff will take a lot of work but he works really hard and that it will open a lot of opportunities.” Isaac has toured several campuses and told me that for undergrad he would like to go to the University of Iowa or the University of Minnesota. However for his graduate degree he wants to attend georgia tech. These schools would help him because as you probably knew the university of iowa specializes in medicine and georgia tech specializes in well, tech, stuff like programming, robotics, the whole shabang. As for the university of minnesota isaac said,“I took a campus tour and was overall just very impressed by the university.” As for a career he said,” I don’t really know what sort of job I want in the field, but I know i’m interested in biomedical engineering.”