CHEPS Student Blog

I remember very vividly complaining to my mom about my first few days working at CHEPS. So much paperwork, HIPPA and PEERS certifications, and other mundane tasks that bored me to no end. Similar to any onboarding experience, mine was filled was confusion and boredom. This time though, onboarding occurred over zoom calls and emails, which added more headaches to an already tough process. Then, I was put on my first two teams: PEDS resident scheduling and Trauma doctor scheduling, and even though I was clueless about what that meant, I was told to start working. However, after meeting with my two team leads and my assigned peer mentor, everything started to make sense. I especially remember one of my team leads telling me to just “give it a week,” which was frustrating advice to hear at the time, but in hindsight helped me have the patience to get over the learning curve.

Hi! My name is Matt Howard and I am a rising junior from Atlanta, GA. I am studying Industrial and Operations Engineering with a double minor in Computer Science and International Studies and this is my first summer at CHEPS. In addition to the two projects I mentioned above, I am also working on one more provider scheduling project, with a CHEPS alumnus in Beirut, as well as facilitating an online course teaching other students about the U.S. healthcare system and two other small organizational projects. Aside from my great projects, I have learned so much from working in CHEPS this summer that I want to share a bit of in this blog post, including how to onboard and work virtually, send good business emails, and stay organized.

Working through email and Zoom calls has definitely been better than I first expected. The CHEPS staff, in particular, has tried very hard to make this unprecedented summer as similar to normal as possible by designating 12:30-1:30 every day as “lunch club,” in which we participate in different activities either in small groups or as an entire CHEPS student body. These activities range from social/workouts on Mondays to Journal Club on Tuesdays to Lunch and Learns on Fridays. These activities allow us to meet and hang out with other CHEPS students that we don’t interact with in our project teams. We even did a virtual 5k run earlier in the summer, and I was able to participate even though I was home in Atlanta!

With all of these attempts to make life normal, there are some things I had to get used to when working virtually. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to be patient. Be patient with faulty connection, frozen screen sharing, or any other computer malfunction you can imagine. They happen. A lot. But everyone I’ve had the pleasure of being in a meeting with, both CHEPS students and faculty and residents and doctors at the hospital, have been extremely patient and helpful when these situations arise. I think everyone understands that adjustments have to be made, and are patient with them, especially in the medical community.

This summer I have also had the chance to improve my emailing skills. Although naïve, being able to send well-written emails is an important corporate skill to have. However, I must admit, whenever I send very important emails, for example, any email to Amy or a collaborator, I always run them by my teammates first. They are probably super annoyed at all the drafts I send out, but as the summer has gone along, the number of edits per draft has decreased, which I think means I am improving! Insert something about causation and correlation here. The biggest piece of advice when sending important emails, though, is to always read them over two or three times, each time looking at ways to improve them and check for errors. It may seem like overkill, but I think that having professional sounding emails makes a big difference in how you are perceived by people further up the ladder than you.

Lastly, organization is super important. To root this paragraph in context, last summer I did research for a different professor at a different University. The work was super cool, but he gave my partner and I a lot less structure, which led to us being super unorganized. We spent a lot of time at the end of the summer trying to retrace our steps and remember what we did. Not fun! That level of chaos would also NEVER fly with Amy, and I mean that in the best way. For anyone who reads this blog post that doesn’t know, CHEPS works through this online server, and it is spectacularly organized and documented. Every meeting has meeting notes, and every folder has subfolder after subfolder, keeping every document in the right place.

While I may have started my summer at CHEPS complaining about how boring the paperwork and necessary trainings were, I have nearly ended it with a huge smile on my face, having gotten to work on extremely meaningful projects with amazing people having learned a lot of new skills. I’ve also started to get used to the virtual working environment, as I realized that without the commute to North Campus, I get about 30 more minutes of sleep every night!

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Hello! My name is Luke and I have been at CHEPS for a little over a year now. I am a recent graduate and I studied Industrial and Operations Engineering with a minor in Computer Science.

So, let us start from the beginning! I first joined CHEPS during May of 2019. I had no idea what to expect at first. On the first day, I just remember reading a lot of HIPAA rules and regulations. Not super exciting, but I do realize the importance of taking the time and effort to do so. I was then placed onto three teams: Surgical Instruments, Shift Scheduling, and the AD ICU team. I am not going to bore you with all the details, but I will say AD ICU was the most interesting project in my opinion. I was the main coder for that, and we wrote simulation code (in C++) for patient flow through the cardiac ICU. I thought it was cool because I finally got to write code that wasn’t for a class or homework. What was even cooler to me was just being able to work with such a diverse set of people. We had undergrads to master’s students to Ph.D. candidates. It was honestly a lot of fun getting to know people and their backgrounds. One of my fondest memories of that summer was when we had a volleyball tournament outside. Although sadly my team didn’t do too well, it was still fun playing games and just goofing around with my coworkers!

Going into the school year, work became a little different. With the onset of classes, clubs, and other obligations, it was harder to fit in working at CHEPS. But honestly, I was so thankful for the CHEPS family. There were many a time where I texted my project lead last minute as I did not have enough time to finish the code or emailed last minute for an absence due to illness. Through all of this, my coworkers, and the staff at CHEPS were always patient and understanding. I realized that even though I was still working at CHEPS, taking care of oneself was something that everyone valued over anything else. I will always be grateful for the cute little care packages during finals seasons that were packed with snacks and a note! I think just those little things made me deeply appreciative of the community.

Fast forward to this summer, things are even more different. Because of COVID 19, everything has gone virtual. It has honestly been difficult since Zoom brings a lot of technical difficulties; it’s actually the worst to sit through video chats that lag or stutter. But I’ve gotten used to it more and more! Lately, I’ve gotten a lot more used to using Zoom for everything, and after playing around with settings, things work more often than not now. We’ve also still been able to experience community through virtual student presentations, lunch and learns, and fun stuff like talents shows and sharing life hacks.

One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned from this past year is the importance of communication. Whether it’s giving Amy updates on the code, communicating with teammates, or emailing clinical partners, I’ve learned that it’s always better to be overly communicative rather than not. Another lesson that I’ve learned is to not be afraid to ask for help. There have been many times where I’ve been building a schedule or writing simulation code and just got stuck. It’s okay to ask for help in these cases. It’s okay to not know everything!

Before I go, I just want to give a huge shoutout to Amy, Liz, Julia, Billy, Gene, and all the other wonderful staff that make this possible 😊, y’all are awesome! Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this blog post and remember to always Go Blue!!

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Hello! My name is Renata Terrazzan and I am going into my senior year majoring in Public Health Sciences with a double minor in French and Environmental Studies. My goal is to go into Health Administration and get an MPH in health policy and management.

Being a Public Health major in this pandemic has been quite an experience. In a somewhat positive light, these past couple of months have been the first time in my life that someone has asked me my major and actually known what “Public Health” was. Which is one of the only – if not the only – highlight of this pandemic. For a long time, not having anyone know what Public Health was quite discouraging to me and even caused me to waver in my decision to pursue Public Health. Being involved in Public Health in my job this summer has helped me regain confidence in my field and helped me see the importance of it.

CHEPS played a huge role in deciding that I want to pursue an MPH. CHEPS really fell into my lap and I am so grateful it did. I was studying in the UGLi one day – stressing out about summer plans – when a friend and then current CHEPS student recommend I apply. I checked the website out and audibly laughed – this place had so many engineers, there’s no way I’d get in. But I reluctantly applied and – luckily – here I am!

The transition into CHEPS was one that was difficult but ended up being extremely beneficial. For the past three years, I have been exposed to a variety of health and pre-health professionals – public health professionals (of course), researchers, nurses, PAs, doctors, etc. But I had never worked with engineers, who have such a different background from my own. Engineering provides a very technical and scientific demeanor to approaching problems, and one that I was very intimated by. Whenever coding or any math concept was brought up in my meetings for the first couple of weeks at CHEPS, I would shy away from saying anything or even asking questions. But slowly, with the welcoming environment provided by my peers and the CHEPS staff, I began asking more questions and being more comfortable with conversations about those highly technical concepts. Although I may not know exactly what everything means, I am confident in my ability to at least understand the basics and provide my outlook as a public health-trained person. It has also given me the confidence to work in Hospital Administration, where various professionals report and discuss issues of all different levels and you are able to provide guidance and help to them.

I was placed in the State Hospital Staffing Project for CHEPS. This project works to help Psychiatric State Hospitals around Michigan assess their staffing needs. The project really consolidated my interests in hospital management and increasing efficiency in a hospital setting. I’ve spent a lot of time in the U-M hospital as a volunteer for the past 3 years but working behind the scenes has given me an entirely new perspective of the issues hospitals face. Currently, the team is working on building a workbook that will assess each State Hospital’s staffing needs and issues and project future staffing needs. This staffing project has given me the opportunity to talk to hospital administrators firsthand and get their perspective on all the areas that are lacking in their hospitals – things that I couldn’t even imagine when I was just a volunteer. I see the value of having the right tools to assess staffing needs and how understaffing can lead to so many problems in the field.

I really appreciate the diversity in the speakers and activities that the CHEPS team has given to its students this summer. While no one expected our summer bonding activities to be over Zoom, our Monday Socials and Tuesday Journal Clubs are greatly appreciated. The speakers that we have heard from every Friday are each in such different fields within health but are all so kind and generous about their experiences and very willing to help current students reach their goals. My mentor Joe East, who also spoke on a Friday Lunch and Learn, met with me for an hour and gave me great insight about Hospital Administration that I could have never gotten without the CHEPS mentorship program. I also appreciate the care that the students and staff have for each other, whether it be through kind messages in the GroupMe, movie nights about social justice, or emails from Amy about recent social issues, it provides for a very supportive work environment.

CHEPS is such a unique opportunity that I am very lucky to experience as an undergrad. It is exciting to be part of research that is helping people in real-time, unlike almost all other research that takes years to make it into the real world. I am lucky to be a part of this community that is able to meld so many different types of training backgrounds and see how they are all useful in our many projects. I hope to use all that I have learned and am continuously learning in order to optimize health as I move forward in my studies.

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Hello! My name is Alli VanderStoep and I am a second-year master’s student in the Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) program. Although I am one of the older students, I am new to the CHEPS family. I began working at CHEPS at the beginning of May, so I have spent about two and a half months here and have enjoyed every minute of it!

One of the projects I am working on is the Outpatient Surgery (OPS) Revamp. The OPS Revamp team is quite large, with 10 students working with Amy who is spearheading the project. We are responsible for creating a tool to assist the University Hospital in scheduling the backlogged elective patient surgeries (due to COVID-19) and keeping track of their resource utilization. It is incredibly rewarding to contribute to this team effort and to receive positive feedback from the hospital surgeons that our tools are helping!

Another project I am working on is the Family Medicine (FM) Clinic project, which is brand new, like the OPS Revamp project. We are partnered with a CHEPS alumnus, a graduated medical student now in residency at a university in Lebanon. Our team is responsible for creating a tool to improve the scheduling process of the FM residents at the university. It has been a valuable experience to see the project unfold from the beginning. We started the process by talking to the collaborator and have since begun to create the mathematical formulation and the scheduling tool. I’m excited to see this project continue developing!

I will admit that working virtually has been a little weird. My first week was entirely dedicated to installing the secure connection software, accessing the server, and mapping to the project folders. Email, Zoom, and Slack have replaced in-person interactions. I learned more about Zoom than I ever could have ever imagined. Here is a running short list of Zoom tips and etiquette rules I’ve picked up:

1. Keep yourself on mute in a large group…please
2. End every call by waving goodbye
3. Thumbs up and thumbs down are effective methods of communication
4. There is a 50% success rate in screen sharing. If the shared screen freezes or displays a black screen, leave the meeting and come back

A drawback of remote work is the lessened social atmosphere. It is a bummer I am unable to spend time in person with the smart and passionate researchers, working at the SI building, eating burgers at Frita Batidos, or tubing down the Argo Cascades. I also hear that CHEPSters don’t mess around in pick up volleyball! But, instead of in-person activities, CHEPS has interwoven virtual social activities to make the summer as enjoyable as possible. I participated in the socially distanced 5k run last month, which was a hoot and a half! It was great to see a handful of my workmates in person and enjoy post-run brownies baked by Amy’s son Peter.

Additionally, every Monday during lunch, there is a Zoom social event. It rotates between a workout and a game. The first workout in which I participated was yoga… it might have been my last. Other students were smart in turning off their video cameras. I left mine on and almost tipped over in Warrior 3 pose. The game Covidopoly was a hit! It’s similar to Monopoly but with cards and an appropriate COVID theme. Mask cards are invaluable and collecting properties such as Cuomo Circle and New York Hospital will help you win the game.

Amidst all the craziness, the established CHEPSters made sure I felt warmly welcomed. I was also assigned a mentor who helped me to get onboarded. Throughout my time here, I have seen that CHEPS not only greatly cares about the work, but also the people! I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer when I can meet more CHEPSters and continue to apply my IOE knowledge to healthcare!

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My name is Kristine Wang and I just graduated this May with a bachelor’s in computer science. Wow, that feels a little bit weird to say. I’ve been working at CHEPS since the summer after my sophomore year and now through my senior year. Since that time, I have been on a wide array of projects and have gotten to know so many amazing people. I think CHEPS really solidified the course I wanted my life to take, and I thank every person I’ve been able to meet through CHEPS for that.

Before starting at CHEPS I already had some interest in healthcare, working on a project team that tried to address medical needs in various communities. Even then, I still felt that healthcare seemed like an odd path for a computer science student to take. I really did not know what to expect outside of a project team setting. Part of me thought I was destined to sit behind a computer not really knowing why I was doing something. CHEPS was not like that. CHEPS brought me to a side of healthcare I never really thought I would experience or could ever experience. Most of my work before CHEPS was more patient-centered, which I think is what most people think of when engineers work on healthcare challenges. Even if someone is working on a device or service for the providers to use it is generally centered around the patient. This makes sense, but the projects I worked on through CHEPS were mostly all focused on improving the lives of the providers themselves. Additionally, working in an IOE centered lab taught me some interesting aspects of scheduling and other engineering disciplines that I otherwise would not have learned. I think CHEPS gives an amazingly well-rounded insight into healthcare operations by giving me opportunities to learn about research topics, solve real problems, and interact with a wide array of people.

During my time at CHEPS, I mostly worked on Provider Scheduling projects and additionally the M-SAFETY project. Provider scheduling projects were projects that looked to automate the process of scheduling various providers (attendings, residents) while improving those schedules by understanding provider preferences. On the other hand, M-SAFETY was a project that attempted to make an additional display to the vitals monitor in a step-down ICU, that would improve communication between doctors and nurses specifically concerning pressure wounds and catheters.

Starting on provider scheduling was honestly a little bit confusing for me. In the computer science curriculum, scheduling is always said to be a “hard” problem and so no “fast” solution to solving them. At the time I had never heard of linear programming before and did not understand how you could use linear algebra to solve a scheduling problem. These were all important concepts that, although focused on an IOE perspective, showed me how my mathematical education could be used to solve problems. It was cool! So not only did I get to work on solving these problems, but I would also get to implement these formulas. I got the experience of working with a large existing codebase with Shift and scheduling residents, starting my own completely new codebase with Trauma scheduling attendings, and working on databases and web design with M-Safety. Each project although they had similar problems taught me, besides the code aspects of it, how to interact with people in every aspect of healthcare and what they seem to care about. I thought all these experiences thoroughly balanced the research, practical, and professional parts of working in healthcare. I love that I was given the opportunity to really make these projects my own and given so many opportunities to learn and participate.

In addition to the research experience, the CHEPS community has also been an important part of my college career. I’ve met people and watched them graduate and now others are watching me leave. It’s kind of a strange feeling because CHEPS has been such an anchor throughout my college career. Before when I was feeling a little lost at the end of my sophomore year, until now through this pandemic, it’s been great to see so many friendly faces. Summers in Ann Arbor would not have been the same without CHEPS: blueberry picking, cascades, volleyball. The school year would not have been as festive without the treats, holiday parties, and reunions. Thanks for always making me feel cared for. Now partly because of CHEPS, I’ll be off to Kansas City to work at Cerner a health information company. I hope to bring some of CHEPS there with me and hope to see anyone who happens to be down there 😊.

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Name? Year? Program? Where are you from? Are you new to CHEPS? And a boring or interesting fact about yourself. My name is Matt. I am a recent graduate of U of M. I come from Ann Arbor, MI. I am not new to CHEPS and I am right-handed. (I had to go with the classic.)

I figure I should start this blog the same way that CHEPS always starts its semesters: with questions that help introduce ourselves at CHEPS at our kickoff meetings. I started at CHEPS in the Fall 2016 semester, newly recruited by Amy at my sister’s wedding. If you want that story, you should ask Amy. Joining CHEPS was pretty difficult for me. I knew what they did, and I knew of the engineering research magic that went on behind the scenes. I didn’t think I could bring anything to the table. My technical skills were limited. I hadn’t taken any significant college courses or really ever done research. I didn’t even think I wanted to do research. I was focused on becoming an MD. Clearly, a lot has changed between then and now.

I spent the majority of my time at CHEPS on the Chemotherapy Pre-Mix project under the mentorship of Donald Richardson. Together, we created a dynamic tool that could be used by pharmacists in the UM Rogel Cancer Center to determine which chemotherapy treatments could be mixed ahead of time before a patient arrives, saving both patient waiting time and pharmacy tech overtime costs while reducing the number of treatments wasted. Over the course of the project, I was able to get into the pharmacy and drug mixing environment and became more interested in the chemistry aspect of things, rather than the healthcare aspect of things. Why did drugs only last 8 hours, 12 hours, or even 2 hours after they mixed? Why did they decompose so quickly (or not)? These were questions I could begin to investigate as I dove further into chemistry. Through the rest of my time at Michigan, I shifted away from becoming a medical doctor toward research to answer fundamental questions.

I can’t imagine doing anything else besides research and I am now pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemistry at UC Berkeley. I found new research interests in renewable energies and green chemistry. More than 80% of the global energy demand is met with some sort of consumption of fossil fuels. This resulted in a 35% increase in total greenhouse gases since 1990 with the increase in globalization and industrialization of our world. Practical technology is coming that can transform solar energy into hydrogen gas or upgrade agricultural waste products into renewable biofuels along with new technologies to sequester the unwanted gases we already put out there. This is an area of research I hope to push the boundary of.

Moving forward, there is so much I am going to miss at CHEPS. I’m going to miss the endless amounts of treats and snacks all around the office, the spontaneous trips to the volleyball courts, shooting hoops in the breakroom, and conducting research hand-in-hand with so many medical professionals through collaborations I never thought I’d get a chance to have.

To me, CHEPS is what research should be. Results are great and results definitely come but it’s the emphasis on the students and the educational experience that make CHEPS special and so hard to leave. We are able to learn how to conduct and enjoy research (even with its frustrations…). CHEPS has laid a very strong research foundation for me that I hope to continue to build upon.

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