Social Impact Internships: Michelle Lam (’27)
I’m Michelle, and I’m majoring in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in Design. I am particularly interested in human-centered design and developing impactful, solutions that address real-world challenges.
This past IAP, I had the incredible opportunity to work at Design that Matters in Seattle, a nonprofit focused on creating medical devices for hospitals in low resourced countries. I worked as a Biomedical Engineering Intern and focused on developing and analyzing characterization experiments that could validate the latest device’s clinical claims. It was an eye-opening experience that completely changed the way I see the role of technology.
Before this internship, I saw medical technology through the lens of a typical American–blindingly white walls filled with staff rushing through sterile hallways, labs buzzing with activity, patients surrounded by machines that monitor every heartbeat, and nurses that arrive with the click of a button.
This, unfortunately, isn’t the healthcare experience of most countries. Picture that hospital, but strip away the pristine walls, replaced by tarps and makeshift rooms. Take away the trained nurses, specialized doctors, and constant power supply. In many rural hospitals, this is the harsh reality. Nurses are sometimes outnumbered 20-to-1 by patients and power outages can limit electricity to just four hours a day. Pediatricians are few and far between, and neonatologists might as well be a distant dream. Equipment that could be used to save lives is often neglected in storage cabinets because the staff aren’t properly trained to use it or they are too difficult to sanitize and maintain.
This is where the project I worked on, Otter, comes in. The problem Otter was trying to solve was preventing and treating hypothermia–sounds simple enough right? To me, it sounded like a solved problem. But the problem isn’t that the technology doesn’t exist. In fact, it hardly ever is.
There’s a quote by William Gibson that hangs in the workroom of Design that Matters: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” The quote stuck with me for a number of reasons, but mainly because it highlighted the crucial reality of the inequities that exist in healthcare and the gravity of this marginal disparity is something most people, including myself, aren’t fully aware of. Existing in a space where I was forced to face these truths every day made me recognize how dormant these problems were in my head and drove me to look atengineering in a different light.
What makes Otter remarkable isn’t its technology. Otter wasn’t solving the big problems, it was solving the little ones. It’s designed to be “hard to use wrong,” meaning an untrained staff should easily navigate its user interface. Unlike incubators which are complicated and hard to clean, Otter can be sanitized in minutes and is portable, allowing babies to be warmed even in transit.
It also runs on both battery and power so it works in hospitals with unreliable electricity. Every aspect of Otter was crafted with rural hospitals in mind, and that was only possible because Design that Matters wasn’t just searching for a solution, they were uncovering the problem itself. By chipping away at the problem through meticulous observational studies, talking with nurses and doctors, and encouraging critical feedback from users and engineering, Otter’s design was inevitable because it was shaped entirely by the problem itself.
The internship taught me a powerful lesson about challenging my perception of social issues and immersing myself in user experience before jumping to ungrounded solutions. I’ve learned that social change and social impact don’t stem from having all the answers, but from being involved in the community I want to change and having a deep understanding of the problem. To me, Otter is much more than just a warming device–it’s a product of deep collaboration, open perspective, and looking beyond engineering disciplines.
As valuable as it was to design my own characterization experiments, work with a medical device, analyze data, and present technical reports, what stuck with me the most was getting my first taste of how real impact happens. In a place like MIT where students are constantly pushing the boundaries of innovation, it’s easy to get caught up in the frontiers of technological advancements and chase the next big breakthrough. But it’s crucial to remember how privileged we are to be working on technology that is light years ahead of what’s available in many parts of the world. The disparity in access to technology is a problem that can so easily be overlooked, and I want to be someone who recognizes that and works to make technology more equitable.
I am eternally grateful for this experience and for the opportunity to see how engineering can be a catalyst for social change. As someone whos still learning what I want to do and how I want to impact the world, I am excited for more opportunities that expand my understanding of the complex world of social impact and how I can get involved. Moving forward, I just know I want to use my education not just to innovate, but to expand innovation’s reach to all communities around the world.
Tags: IAP 2025, Social Impact Internships, Social Impact Internships 2025, Social Impact Internships IAP 2025
