Hey everyone! My name is Charlie Lockyer; I’m a rising senior at Baker studying computer science and I can’t wait to share my experience here at iSEED with you! While I’ll only be here for ~10 days instead of the full trip (I have to start work, boo…), I’m so excited to see all that Costa Rica has to offer and make every day count. I’ve never been this far south in my life and never stayed in another country for this long, so even if I’ll be here less than everyone else, it feels like more than enough time to get a taste of the culture and make some lifelong memories.
Right after arriving, it was clear that this place was much different than the US, but everyone was immediately so inviting and happy to welcome me into our group. Everyone else on the trip is one or two classes below me and I knew none of them well before coming here, so getting the chance to connect with a bunch of Rice students I’d never met before was great. The Selina is an amazing place to stay as well; there’s always music playing in the lobby and it just feels like I could hang out there forever. I’m already thinking that I’m not gonna be here as long as I’d like to be…
During my first full day here, I got to go on two clinical visits, one to the Children’s Hospital and one to Clinica Biblica. The Children’s Hospital visit was at 8am, so our whole group had to wake up early and eat breakfast. Luckily, since Costa Rica is 2 hours behind the time I was used to in Baltimore, I just pretend that it’s 2 hours later than it is and it helps me wake up. This got me in a good enough place to go for a morning walk around our hotel, on which I promptly got lost and took an extra 5 minutes to get back to the Selina. When I got back, the rest of the group was up and already at the breakfast table. I didn’t have that much time to eat since we needed to order Ubers by 7:30, so I ate as much fruit as I could and got ready to go on our visit.
For someone with little to no interest in the medical field, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the first clinical visit. The doctor who gave us the tour was a great host and showed us a lot of stuff I never thought I’d get to see. After the visit ended, we went to the central market and looked around for about an hour, which was overwhelming but a lot of fun. We then got lunch at a cafe nearby and I had a pretty amazing quesadilla. Once we got back to Selina, we took some much-needed break time until 3pm when we did yoga as a group. This was my first time doing yoga, and I was definitely not prepared for the flexibility that it requires. It was still a great experience overall though and I’d love to do it again one day. After that, we got ready to go to Clinica Biblica, which was by far our shortest visit since the doctors didn’t seem to want us there. We left around 5:30 and got back early for some dinner, which was nice since I don’t think I would’ve been able to take another second in that waiting room. Later that night, we relaxed at the Selina for a bit, then Victoria, Izzie, Madison, and myself stopped by the Latin dancing class in the lobby. We hung out for a bit longer at the bar after it ended, then called it an early night before our last clinical visit the next day.
The next morning started much like the last, but this time, a group of 8 of us was headed to the Geriatric Hospital together. While I was very bored for most of it, at the end, we got a chance to go into the OR and see two live surgeries. For someone who doesn’t like medical procedures at all and has no interest in the field, I was a bit hesitant to go in, but I knew that this would potentially be the only opportunity I’d ever get in my life to go into an operating room. We all put on scrubs and headed in one by one, where we were met by the doctors playing music and cracking jokes during surgery. I’m so happy that I got to see that; it’s such a unique opportunity and I never thought in a million years that I’d ever watch surgery.
After the visit, we ate lunch as a group at Ondina right next to UCR, which was amazing. As soon as lunch ended, we had to go to our classroom session at UCR to finish up the Needs Finding Bootcamp. This was definitely not the highlight of my day as I didn’t feel like we were learning anything new, but it went by pretty fast. On the way back, we stopped at a grocery store and picked up a bunch of ingredients to make dinner. As a group, I’m very proud of our efforts; we made some great food and drinks and then had a great time playing games until bed.
The next morning was the beginning of the Medical Innovation Bootcamp; none of us really had any idea of what to expect going into this experience but I was excited to do something different than clinical visits. We were there from 8-5 on the first day, and I honestly wish I had anything truly notable to share, but my only memory is that I was bored out of my mind. It felt like I was repeating a condensed version of the first half of ENGI 120 in one day, which I thought was a class I had escaped three years ago. I understand that the bootcamp was not designed for an audience like us, and it was probably extremely valuable to those who had never seen the material, but since ENGI 120 was a prerequisite for coming on this trip, I’m very confused why we were forced to do something like that when we could’ve done something actually useful to our personal growth. We got home relatively late that night and went out for dinner, but so much energy was spent on the workshop that we couldn’t really have much fun.
The next day was much better though! While a lot of the lessons were redundant, we got to do the Bajaj Challenge as a team, which was honestly really fun. I had never done something like that and it was great to do with my team. Jose, one of the Costa Rican students in my group, was amazing to get to know and was nice enough to come out to lunch with us. The next day was more of the same, and it was nice to wrap it all up with presentations. While it was very hot that day and standing for 2 hours was really hard, I’m happy we did it and proud of the end result from our team. That night, some of us went out to explore San Jose nightlife and I had a great time seeing what this city is all about.
Sunday was the first day we had off, so I took full advantage and slept in as late as I could, which was only until 9am. At 10, we left to go see the waterfall (I forget the name), which was honestly one of the coolest places I’ve ever been in my life. We hiked through the rainforest for about 20 minutes and saw a beautiful waterfall right at the end; we went swimming in the water and I took like 500 pictures of the whole experience (I’ll share a few of my favorites here). It was honestly such an amazing way to end the week and I’m really happy I got to share that experience with everyone on the trip.
Unfortunately for me, next week is my last week on the trip (I leave Thursday), so I only have one more blog post to share after this. I’ve had such a great time thus far and can’t wait to see what’s next!