As a senior at Duke University in 2010, Dr. Quinn Wang Quinn majored in English in her pre-med program and was trying to figure out how to combine her love of medicine with her love of the English language. Here’s how her graduation thesis was conceived – Through the lens of medicine: The landscape of violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), All Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old People (2005) -in the end victory Award in the English category for “Most Original Honors Thesis”.
Fast forward 12 years and Wang is now out of medical school and can call himself a Double Duke. She completed her ophthalmic residency at UCSF and returned to her alma mater on Saturday, November 5th. A celebration of medicine, humanities and business in the Duke Medical Ethics Journal He tells an enthusiastic audience at the Schiciano Auditorium about his journey from Duke to now.
She began her story in the infamous year of 2020, when COVID-19 forced her private practice in the Bay Area of California to stop seeing patients. She felt uneasy and anxious about how the patient was doing, and tried to keep up with the patient as best she could, but of course there were limits. Then, months later, one of her patients went blind.
In the wake of this tragic moment, Wang is frustrated that the tech capital of the world, San Francisco, still doesn’t have a good way to test people’s eyesight from home to prevent what should be preventable. I remembered Guided by her one question, which she considered the most important to answer, she said, until COVID-19 abates and people can come to clinics again, she can help herself. I decided to put something together.
Wang took a common visual inspection tool used in clinics and, with a few simple Photoshop edits and a bit of code, turned it into a series of simple multiple-choice questions that could be completed at home. rice field. This simple but powerful transformation quadrant eyea startup she co-founded with a software engineer Christine Hara.
Quadrant Eye’s journey has taken her from private practice as an ophthalmologist to jumping into business by applying and being selected. Y Combinator, a self-proclaimed “startup graduate school”. Twice a year, YC invests $500,000 in select early-stage startups. We then provide three months of intensive support to get your startup on track and ready to present to investors for funding. At YC, Hara worked on his Quadrant Eye app, and Wang updated hundreds of prescriptions.
Ultimately, though, the most important place Quadrant Eye has led Wang to is a journey of self-mastery that applies to all human endeavors, from building a startup to researching to waking up every morning. As she explains, the life of a startup involves constantly learning new things and always failing. She candidly admitted that she, like everyone else, has bad days when all she can do is throw in the towel and get the job done early. says Wang, but after all, “we’re all climbing our own mountains.” It takes a “superhuman effort” to push through, but it’s worth it.
And that English paper? Wang describes how Quadrant Eye’s first investor, “Let’s call him Charlie,” asked her all the necessary questions investors need to ask early-stage startups (thoughts try). shark tank). But he also asked her for all her 50 or so pages of her honors graduation thesis, which she had written ten years before her, the non-traditional one. Apparently, he saw a mention of it on LinkedIn, which piqued her interest.A few weeks later, Wang got a call saying she was interested in investing, and admitted her paper had played a role. I was. To him, the uniqueness and quality of her papers show that Wang can solve problems, communicate well, and think creatively, and Wang himself agrees. “My English thesis showed me that I could do the hard things,” she said.
