Started in health sciences. Stayed.
Ten years as a Registered Nurse — two on acute floors, eight in operating rooms, six months in community. The work taught me to think clearly under pressure and to make decisions in messy real-world conditions.
The decade, in order
I went where the work was hardest and most concrete — acute floors first, then years in operating rooms, then a stint in community to see the system from the other side.
- 2015 – 2017Acute care floors. Triage, prioritization, learning to be useful when everything is happening at once.
- 2017 – 2024Operating rooms. Eight years of high-precision teamwork, instrument setup, and surgeon-team workflow.
- 2025Community nursing — six months. Saw the post-discharge side of the same patients I'd been wheeling into surgery.
What the work taught me
Think clearly under pressure. An OR is a small room where six people have to coordinate on something that can't be paused. You learn to triage signal from noise, and to ship a decision before you have all the information.
Design workflow for the team, not the individual. A lot of OR nursing is workflow design in disguise — instrument trays, count protocols, handoffs. The good systems are the ones the team can run on a tired Tuesday, not just on a perfect day.
Make things that work in messy real-world conditions. Edge cases aren't edge cases when you're the one holding the patient's chart. Tools have to survive the day they're used at 2am by someone who's been on for fourteen hours.
Why I'm here now
I'm transitioning into product design — taking the same instincts (clarity under pressure, workflow for tired humans, the bias toward shipping) and pointing them at software instead of OR carts.
I'm looking for product design roles where I can keep doing both — shipping useful things, and being a little playful about how they look and feel.