Horgan Seminar Blog

  Gursimran Vasir                                                                  2/11/2026 Science Writing Seminar The Waiting Game: Doctor Appointments Have Never Felt So Long I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honors System. I am all too accustomed to the doctor's office song and dance. Appointment at 1:30, you see the doctor finally at 1:55, and they are done with you by 2:01. Then you go to schedule the follow-up appointment, and they tell you the next availability is May…today, February 8th. Of course, this isn't just the experience with my primary health care, but dentist, optometrist, allergist, orthopedist, dermatologist, you name it, and I am not the only one. Fifty-three percent of physicians note that their patients are waiting over 20 minutes...

  Jillian Olear Prof. John Horgan  HST 401A Seminar in Science Writing- Paper #2 08 February 2026 I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System. Healthcare from the Patient’s Perspective I had cancer when I was thirteen. I kind of hate talking about it. Well, that’s a lie. I don’t mind talking about it, but I also don’t like bringing it up. Especially when it’s been so long since I went through it and I’m in an entirely different stage of life now. However, being a cancer survivor gives me a somewhat-unique perspective on the healthcare system. I have many opinions on where I think the problems that lie within it are located. Some that I was fortunate not to experience at the time, but not lucky enough to entirely avoid. My mom was measuring my height when she noticed what she thought was a swollen thyroid (turns out it wasn’t). It was a Sunday, her and my dad were supposed to get on a plane and go to Florida on Wednesday. She booked me an appointment to be ...

           Thank God my mother is teacher. Teachers have some of the best health insurance in the country. I get to take advantage of that fact until I'm 26 (the age at which I will no longer be covered by her insurance). I have a $10 co-pay for doctor's visits, pay next to nothing for prescriptions, and can be comfortable in the fact that I won't go into financial ruin if I break a bone. This, unfortunately, is not the case for most Americans. Those without insurance pay about $400 on average for their yearly physical, without including additional fees for imaging, materials used, or any other doctor's fees [ 1 ]. How about prescription prices? Lexapro, a common antidepressant, costs $579.15 on average for a month's supply without insurance [ 2 ]. This is significantly higher than the production cost [ 3 ]. This is not isolated to Lexapro. The average price for name brand pharmaceuticals was $365.12 per monthly dose as of 2020 [ 4 ]. Not just doctor's visi...

  On July 4th, 2015, I woke up in a tent in Rhode Island with intense eye pain. At 10 years old, I had never experienced anything like this before and was definitely not expecting this on my annual family trip. That morning began my seven year struggle with a chronic eye condition and my first experience with the problems of the healthcare system. This struggle even motivated me to become a doctor myself, with the goal of doing everything I can to prevent this from happening to someone else.  That day on July 4th, I woke up with a stye, which is a painful bump on the eyelid that is usually caused by a blocked gland. Eventually, the stye went away, but two or three took its place and soon, both eyes were affected. My mom started taking me to the eye doctor because my eyes would be so swollen and painful that I could barely open them. We ended up going to all the eye doctors in a 25 mile radius and each doctor gave a different diagnosis, different treatment, and none of them...

  Our eyes process 36,000 bits of information per hour, taking around 65 percent of our brain's capacity, the most out of any organ, in order to deliver our reality to us. In the center, where your optic nerve resides in a small blind spot, the hole in our vision, which, unless you develop certain eye diseases, you would never discover. This blind spot is filled in by the brain through the processes of perceptual filling, using contours in the space, past experiences, and the surrounding colors and lighting to make up the difference for this small region. This skill, while incredibly important to providing us a full field of vision, leaves us vulnerable to visual tricks.  See for yourself, hold these cards out arms length, focus on the dots, and take turns closing each eye. You will notice the stars disappear.  Traditionally, there are two theories to explain the neurology behind perceptive filling: symbolic and isomorphic. Proposed in 1988 by Kingdom and Moulden, the sym...

  Jonah Diaz Professor John Horgan HST 401-A 26 January 2026 Honey I Shrunk the Robot: Breakthrough in Microscopic Actuators with Potential Applications in Healthcare Nothing frustrates me more than dimensioning components pertaining to an engineering design concept. Naturally, it would be reasonable to optimize the design’s GDT (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing) based on a set of parameters such as performance and efficiency, but you’ll find that the real world presents its own arsenal of constraints to hinder or compromise any “ideal design.” A group of peers and myself had designed a robotic hand which we felt would perform its directed set of tasks optimally and this had been further validated through a series of simulations and analyses run. However, it was to our team’s utter dread that we realized that this design could not be realized as any viable actuation method would make the design unwieldy cumbersome, lacked the necessary deliverable power or could not fit withi...