I had braces in high school. And I loved them.
Every day I could see my teeth moving from huge and bad to straight and normal – which meant that the occasional associated pain (outside of that first throbbing week) was practically enjoyable. Even today, I love putting on my retainers after a few weeks (or, more often, months) of neglect. Maybe I’m weird, but there’s just something wonderful about biting down and feeling your teeth move.
Because I loved my braces so much – and, let’s be honest, there’s good money in it – I figured a career as an orthodontist was exactly what I should study for. So I started at EWU with a packed schedule of chemistry, anatomy, and physiology.
And cadavers.
Now, I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m a squeamish person (unless we’re talking needles), but dead bodies? That’s a whole different ball game. Every lab period, when we had to enter that smelly white lab and see those people just…lying there, was a struggle. Hence my career in graphic design.
However, I recently stumbled upon a Kickstarter campaign that quite possibly could have changed my course in life. The Virtuali-Tee is a T-shirt that uses virtual reality to enable people to view and explore human anatomy on a live person. No more smelly lab, no more bodies. Behold, learning tools of the future… today! Talk about the perfect mashup of technology, design, and learning.
I wouldn’t change my career for anything, of course, but that T-shirt definitely would have helped me pass all those science classes!
