The pointy things that most of us try to avoid hold a strange attraction for Candice Cheung who isn’t afraid of getting shots or giving blood. In fact, these experiences are almost like a field trip for the third-year student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME).

“I’ve always been super fascinated by that stuff,” says Cheung, a third year student in the BME. “Really, I’m oddly fascinated with the interaction of devices with the body. Things like pacemakers blow my mind, the fact that there’s a little machine controlling the electrical impulses in your heart, and that’s keeping you alive. It’s still amazing to me.”

Cheung hopes to turn her fascination into a career some day. After she’s through at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and wherever she decides to go for grad school, she wants to work in industry, developing medical devices. But she’s targeting a specific patient group.

“I want to get into veterinary medical devices. I think there’s a real need that isn’t being met,” says Cheung, 21, who was born in the U.S. but moved to Hong Kong when she was a month old. Growing up there, she had two dogs and a chinchilla. Now she lives with her older brother (Brian Cheung, who graduated with an electrical engineering degree from Tech in 2012), and they care for a dog, cat, tortoise, and tropical fish. In her spare time, Candice works in animal hospital in Alpharetta.

“I’ve always loved animals, so that definitely plays a part in my interest. And animals offer such a wide range of possibilities,” says Cheung, who doesn’t have the slightest trace of a Cantonese accent because she attended international schools in Hong Kong where most of her teachers were Americans or Australians. Also, her parents, both college professors, spent many years in the U.S. earning their degrees. “So they’re very fluent in English, too. You know, it’s quite a bit of pressure when both of your parents have doctorates.”

Cheung also is fluent in Cantonese, the dominant language in Hong Kong. Multi-lingual with U.S. citizenship, she learned quickly what it was like to be a third culture kid in a pulsing international city that made a historic transition from British to Chinese rule in 1997.

“It was very interesting growing up there. Even though it’s obvious that I’m Chinese, and I lived there all my life, there was a real stigma attached to being an international student,” Cheung says. “On the train, I’d be speaking fluent English with a friend, and I could hear the people around me speaking in Cantonese, saying things like, ‘hmmf, she’s another one of those third culture kids.’ Like, they treated me as if I wasn’t in tune with their language or their culture.”

Sometimes, though, she’d turn the tables on the gossip, saying something to the other riders in perfect Cantonese. “That would freak them out,” says Cheung, who plans on keeping her American citizenship but worries over current events in Hong Kong, where student-led pro-Democracy demonstrations (the 'Umbrella Movement') have divided the region and her family.

"I try hard not to get involved in politics with my family, because my family is huge," she says. "My cousins, the younger members of the family, are very enthusiastic about the demonstrations. But my older relatives, uncles and aunts and whatnot, don't like it."

In spite of the long distance between her and her large family, Cheung says the transition from Hong Kong to Atlanta was a relatively painless one. “The biggest change is I can’t get used to how huge the food portions are here.”

She’s well used to the pace, though. Cheung says she was always one of those kids who did everything in school: gymnastics, track and field, volleyball, national honor society, student council, volunteered at an animal clinic. At Georgia Tech, in addition to maintaining a busy course load and holding down her job at the animal clinic, she is part of the student leadership team that recently launched the BME Learning Commons.

The process for that started a year ago and culminated with the opening of the Learning Commons in September. Cheung is now the ‘product owner’ of the podcast studio, which basically means that she’s the team leader for that quadrant of the BME Learning Commons universe, headquartered on the fourth floor of the U.A. Whitaker Bioengineering Building. As she formulates programming for BME podcasts, she’s considering examples (and drawing inspiration) from her personal interests.

“Every day, when my brother drives me to work we listen to a podcast on Magic: The Gathering, the card game. Yes,” she says, momentarily interrupting her story, “I am proud to be a game nerd. So, we listen to the guy who founded the company that created Magic: The Gathering. And it is so nerdy, but so fantastic, because the guy really knows his audience and it feels like he’s reaching out to me personally. I think that’s the secret to a good podcast – know your audience and speak directly to them. So that’s what I’m going to try and do for BME.”

Candice Cheung's LinkedIn Page


Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience