The first thing I realized when talking to Paulina was that she has lots of stuff going on due to her impressive amount of energy - I wished I would have had that sort of motivation in medical school! But, before we got into all of that, I think the most interesting thing about Paulina is that she’s still working as a doctor in the hospital while building up her startup on the side. So she’s in the middle of making the transition out of the hospital.
Additionally, I think Paulina is very interesting because her path is yet another one than Ramin’s and Matt’s, my two prior guests - while Ramin worked as a software developer and Matt went down a hard-to-summarize public policy, regulatory and Chief Medical Officer route, Paulina’s approach is yet another one. Listen to the episode to find out more!
Some background on Paulina: Paulina Cecula is a doctor and now, most recently, a co-founder of Dama Health. She studied medicine at the Imperial College in London and, in parallel, also did a Bachelor of Science in Management at the Imperial College Business School. Around a year ago, she co-founded Dama Health with the goal to empower patients and their clinician to make personalised contraception decisions. At the same time, she’s wrapping up her first foundation year working as a doctor at the Imperial College Healthcare Trust & Hospitals in London. She’s doing Obgyn, geriatrics and acute medicine there.
I always try to put myself in the perspective I had when I just got out of medical school and knew I didn’t want to work as a doctor, but had no clue what exactly I was going to do and, most importantly, had no network to rely on. Accordingly, I asked Paulina how she built up her network and how she ultimately came up with co-founding her startup, Dama Health. I also ask her about studying management (she did a Bachelor’s degree during medical school) and whether other doctors should consider doing the same.
I really enjoyed talking to Paulina and I’m sure you will enjoy listening to her answers, too!
Listen to the Episode
Links As Mentioned In The Podcast
- Paulina on LinkedIn.
- Dama Health: Paulina’s startup which aims to help women and their clinicians in choosing the right contraceptive.
- Post on Dama Health on the website of the Imperial College Accelerator: We briefly talked about accelerator programs and Paulina mentioned that the Imperial College Accelerator was quite helpful for their company.