By GE Careers
“If you’re going to be doing something for an extended period of time in your life, it should be something that gives you a real sense of purpose.”
Not our words, but those of Natalie, a GE Healthcare Field Service Engineer whose current role extends across the entire Detroit area in Michigan.
“Going into hospitals,” she continues, “seeing patients and the quality of care that they’re getting due to our equipment – and the amazing work of the staff in those hospitals, of course! – well, it’s humbling to say the least, but also incredibly rewarding.”
So how did Natalie find her way to GE Healthcare in the first place?
“Before working here, I was a Biomed in the Army.” she says. “I was deployed to a combat hospital, where I worked on everything from ultrasound to X-ray rooms to sterilizers. That experience really taught me how think on my feet, and be prepared for the worst, because I knew that anything could go down at any time.”
“On several occasions, we were called out when a sandstorm had hit, and brought the hospital’s CT scanner grinding – literally – to a halt. Each time, we had to remove the external covers and clean out the dust and sand from the slip rings inside the gantry – which is not a job I’ve ever had to deal with back home!”
“Anyway,” Natalie goes on to say, “two of the women I was deployed with out there, worked for GE Healthcare. And seeing the support they got from the company was super-encouraging to me. Ultimately, that’s what prompted me to apply.”
And how has her military experience helped her since she joined?
“One time,” Natalie says, “when I was down in Indiana, helping one of my co-workers with an installation, I got a call from a nearby hospital. It was minutes away from me, but four hours from any of my other team-mates, and all the monitors in their emergency department was showing an alarm.
“It was around 10pm when I got there, and I realized it was a problem I’d seen before. But the usual fix – a simple change of IP address – just wasn’t working. Eventually, after two days of trouble-shooting everything I could think of, and reaching out to people in my team, I figured out it had to be a software issue. I updated the software and, sure enough, the problem was solved.”
“It’s in situations like that,” Natalie says, “that being able to keep calm and focus on the task in hand are so important.”