Problem solving, and helping to educate my patients. One of the biggest challenges in surgery is explaining to patients the different options for surgery. As an engineer, I am pretty good at drawing parallels between surgical techniques and real-world situations so that they are easy to understand. For example, I saw a patient who was bitten by a dog last year and it tore off a big chunk of her nose. While discussing the options for reconstruction, I explained that I needed to replace the three different layers of the nose (skin, cartilage, and mucosa) in order to restore proper function. Her fiancee was a general contractor, and when I explained it was similar to the walls of a house with the exterior siding (skin), wooden structure (cartilage) and drywall/pain (mucosa), they almost immediately “got” what I was trying to explain to them.