Mechanical Engineering and BioMed. Engineering?

[WK95]

Hello,

Has anyone here studied Mechanical Engineering but is doing work related to Biomedical Engineering or in the the Biotechnology or Biomedical Devices industry?

If so, I would like to ask a few questions.
How applicable was a Mechanical Engineering degree to your current work?
Do you ever think that a Biomedical Engineering degree may of been more beneficial?
In your company or firm, are most of the people, especially younger workers who are recent graduates, Biomedical Engineering majors or more traditional engineering majors (Mechanical, Electrical, Chemical, etc)
Does a bacheclors degree in BME provide sufficient enough education to work as an engineer?

So far, my plan is to major in Mechanical Engineering then get my masters in Biomedical Engineering.

 

[Jintachi]

I really wanted to do Biomedical engineering but didnt do biology before so had to route into something else. Was well gutted, biomedical engineering would be SO interesting

 

[ashnek]

Well i am not exactly in the field but i want to, i have done some projects in the area. Most of the guys i know that work in the field as MechE are in the part of doing maintenance on the equipment, as you might know some of those have really tight checking frequency.

But lot of mechanical engineers are in the field of equipment maintenance, i had a professor of mechE who is working on the design of prosthetics and surgical equipment and bolts, so there is a field. The project i have worked involved doing some modifications to infant incubators, the old models presented a problem with increasing sound levels in the canopy and some instrumentation was not calibrated correctly, it was very old equipment that was needed to put back in function. I also did some work with ultrasound equipment and controling vibrations coming from a MR machine.

In short words your field as a mechE is very wide in the part of devices, i was in a bunker with the medical linacs, some of those equips have really big rotatory parts that need lot of precision and accuracy, also there's a real need to cool some of those, all of which can be done as a mechE and of course in the part of prosthetics and biomechanics.

As i said I am not in the field of biomedical engineering i try really hard to get those projects (obviously i don't work alone), when i start my postgraduate school i will try to specialize in medical devices and i really want to work with artificial organs but that might be a bit harder. I would advice to do MechE, when you graduate you have a very broad understanding of many areas so it is really easy to get trained in other, the only difficulty is that since you are so easy to train and most projects are not biomedically oriented then you might end up doing other things.

Hope it helps.

 

[WK95]

Thanks for the help. I'm interested in working in design of medical devices and instrumentation as well as artificial organs. But yes, Mechanical Engineering and its applications are wide and broad. I suppose that's why its a rather popular engineering discipline for many.

Right now, it seems my goal is to study mechanical engineering in college then study Biomedical Engineering for graduate work. Like you, I'm really interested in artificial organs too.

In your line of work, how many people have a Biomedical Engineering engineering degree rather than one of the traditional engineering disciplines such as chemical, electrical or mechanical?

 

[ashnek]

I have never met a biomedical engineer, but i know where they work in my city, mostly they do research on biomechanics and prosthetics in that place, i have not seen them around medical devices. In the field most people i have seen working on medical devices are electrical or electronic engineers, but that's mainly (i think) because most of let's say failures of those equipments are electronic parts, it is REALLY hard that a mechanical part would fail and the type of mechanically associated maintenance (mostly precission and accuracy) is done on schedule which can be annually, exept some equipment like incubators which have to be checked each week and/or after each baby has gone out, by norm.

 

[WK95]

Thanks for the insight.