About

I’m Akshay J. Shah, and you’ve stumbled upon my little corner of the web - and now that you’ve clicked over to the “About” page, I can blatantly indulge all my narcissistic impulses. Aren’t you excited? I’m between my third and fourth years of medical school at Vanderbilt, but I’m currently taking a break from school to work on a non-profit startup. Someday I may even graduate from medical school and become a real doctor. My interests in wilderness medicine, health policy, computer programming and education reform have lasted for at least a few years, so I suppose that they characterize me better than my vast list of transient obsessions.

I graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in 2000 (yes, my high school’s name was that snotty) and Yale in 2005. Between high school and college (and through most of undergrad), I taught public school at Amistad Academy in New Haven, CT; it was a small start-up charter school at first, but it’s grown a lot in ten years. Since the summer of 2008, I’ve ditched medical school (temporarily…take a deep breath, Mom) and moved to San Francisco. I’m spending my time reclaiming my humanity, getting reacquainted with my bike, and working on a charter schooling/healthcare non-profit that some other folks and I have started.

I’m that guy. You know the one I’m talking about: that friend who’s always off pursuing a new, usually scatter-brained obsession. The kind of person who could turn into an otaku and nobody would be surprised. [Disclaimer: I don't like anime. The one time I was convinced to watch an anime film, it turned out to be weird tentacle porn with exploding girls and sex demons. I'm too traumatized to try again.] Most of my little obsessions revolve around making things by hand instead of buying them pre-made; luckily, my hobbies tend to die a quiet death every time I realize that I’m turning into an eccentric hermit. On one hand, I’ve amassed at least a little information about a lot of somewhat obscure topics; on the other hand, I seem to have missed out on all the prerequisites for male bonding. In particular, I don’t follow organized sports. Seriously, people - football? You’ve got to be kidding.

Normocephalic/atraumatic started as one of my side projects. After all, what’s more reasonable than learning HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL to code your own website (which had no content)? Unsurprisingly, I abandoned NC/AT within a few months and the site wasn’t updated for several years. I decided to pick it back up in my third year of medical school (and switch to WordPress) when I realized how much meaningless fluff medical students are forced to wade through during their clinical training. NC/AT began its latest incarnation as a means to pass along bits and pieces of wisdom I acquired on the wards, but it’s broadened in scope since I left medical school.