About
Şahin Parlak
For as long as he can remember, Şahin has thought without pause; and so, he believes, he has been restless and unhappy without pause.
Before he had even started school, his father brought home a computer.
To ease his restlessness, poetry found him — in the eighth grade, and again in the second year of medical school. He wrote poems. His restlessness only grew.
In the third year of medicine, cinema found him. He shot short films. His restlessness only grew.
Instead of a driver's license, he bought a camera; he photographed only portraits.
Asking himself, “Am I perhaps thinking wrongly?”, in his fourth year of medicine he enrolled in the Philosophy Department at Istanbul University. He has been a third-year student for six years now.
He worked three years in the emergency room. He is now a resident in pediatric surgery.
That computer turned, in time, into another restlessness: today he uses it to build medical software for the places where there is none.
Academia calls it “frugal innovation”; he calls it “not the optimum, but what is within reach.”
The literature calls it “clinical decision support”; he calls it “being a hand where there is none.”
Still restless.