Hello, I’m Thomas Oppenheim, a student living in Athens, Georgia. I am from a tiny town in Southwest Georgia ironically named Thomasville. While Thomasville and the surrounding areas presents an abundance of activities such as quail hunting, fresh and saltwater fishing, and even water skiing, there is one thing in common among them all: they are majority outdoors. I was raised to love the outdoors, and I do. But when the weather is subpar from where I am from, there is really not a whole lot to do. Of course there is always spending time with friends, watching TV, and the other typical things one does indoors, but that certaininly can only go on for so long. On one rainy day, I decided to do something different.

Being interested in a career in medicine, I had gone on many specialized medical missions to third-world counties where quality healthcare was lacking. Though the volunteer physicians and nurses were trained as well as they could be, there was always an issue with seeing patients. That is, there were hundreds of patients waiting to be seen, but a language barrier along with being severely understaffed with volunteers limited the number of patients that could be seen. On a less than ideal day in terms of weather, I wanted to fix this problem.

I started programming, unsure of exactly what I was trying to make; all I knew is that I wanted to make a program that would allow more patients to be seen. I ended up, over the course of multiple weeks, creating a bilingual web application that had a charting system with fully functional barcodes. This software was comparable with Amazon’s Echo, too. Long story short, it worked pretty well; I let the physicians utilize it (just to see how well it worked) on their next mission and they saw double the amount of patients they were able to see previous times.

I tell this story because it paints a good picture of who I am: Someone who loves the outdoors, loves helping people, and loves science.