Biomedical Engineering - A Good Choice?

[NT123]

Hi, I have already completed a BSc in math in England, and am currently in applied math grad school, which I am not enjoying at all. I have decided I want to start afresh with engineering, and I am thinking of biomedical engineering ( second choice mechanical engineering ). I have had minimal biology and chemistry background (last time I took them was about 7 years ago in high school), so I am not even sure whether I would like them. I'm going to be taking some intro courses in them next semester so hopefully I'll get a better idea as to whether they will suit me.
I'd be very grateful if any biomedical (or mechanical) engineers or engineering majors could give me some advice / tell me how they are finding their course / job.

Regards, Nick

 

[fasterthanjoao]

I have worked in a bioengineering department for a while: what would you like to know?

I did my undergraduate in physics, and went straight to bioengineering after that. I had zero (didn't even do biology past 2nd year in high school) biology experience, so it was a little hit-the-ground-running in that respect. I found it pretty easy to pick up - but difficult to accept. Biology has a different way from doing things than physics or mathematics. For instance, in pharmacology, there were a lot of 'explanations' of the action pathways of particular drugs. Lots of these pathways/interactions were not fully understood: but that's ok, because we know that if you take drug X with condition Y then it makes you feel better.

I enjoyed the work I did - but it's such a huge field that you can't really ask something that general. The work is so tremendously varied in academia, that people that different people that would each consider themselves bioengineers won't even be able to hold a conversation because they have no idea what the other is talking about.

One thing that I found was that bioengineering departments tend to favour 'pure' degrees when they're recruiting for PhDs. That is, mechanical/electrical engineering, physics, maths. Rather than a bioengineering undergraduate. The reason for that is that they're bringing you in for your ability to solve equations (or some other skill you might have from undergrad) - you don't always need to worry about understanding the biology at the start of a PhD, and what you do need you can pick up.

I know someone who came from a program at Strathclyde university, http://www.strath.ac.uk/dtc/, where the EngD is a 4 year programme - year one is essentially a masters (that you get paid to do) of biology courses - designed as a sort of biology crash course for non-biologists. Then years 2, 3, 4 are the 'PhD'.