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Honestly, as far as degrees Mechanical and Electrical are great. Lots of diversity, bunch of specialties you can focus on and a fairly wide-berth of knowledge.
I'm not sure if stuff has changed since I graduated but Biomedical wasn't really great. The classes you take cover more general knowledge of Chemical/Mechanical/Electrical Engineering and don't go into serious depth in any of them. If you had a company doing work in Biomed I'd guess someone with more in-depth study of Electrical or Mechanical Engineering would have a better shot than a generalist that majored in Biomedical.
I know many friends that were MechE's that got jobs at medical firms after graduation.
From cyclone's post above, I got this:
Biomedical engineers are expected to have employment growth of 72 percent over the projections decade, much faster than the average for all occupations. The aging of the population and a growing focus on health issues will drive demand for better medical devices and equipment designed by biomedical engineers. Along with the demand for more sophisticated medical equipment and procedures, an increased concern for cost-effectiveness will boost demand for biomedical engineers, particularly in pharmaceutical manufacturing and related industries. Because of the growing interest in this field, the number of degrees granted in biomedical engineering has increased greatly. Many biomedical engineers, particularly those employed in research laboratories, need a graduate degree.
It seems like it might have a pretty decent future, though it is more of a specialized engineering field.
The field/industry may, but I would personally suggest a more rounded education that isn't industry specific. I'm more doubting the strength of the degree than the strength of the industry, if that makes sense.
The field/industry may, but I would personally suggest a more rounded education that isn't industry specific. I'm more doubting the strength of the degree than the strength of the industry, if that makes sense.
No, that makes perfect sense. I can get into biomedical engineering with a mechanical or engineering degree, but can I get into mechanical or electrical engineering with a biomedical engineering degree? Sound about right? Thanks!
No, that makes perfect sense. I can get into biomedical engineering with a mechanical or engineering degree, but can I get into mechanical or electrical engineering with a biomedical engineering degree? Sound about right? Thanks!
I'm not an engineer, but I work with a few biomedical engineers as well as scientists who started out as engineers, but drifted into pharma research. I can't speak for their day to day, but when I'm spending time with them, specifically one woman usually, it's for help with one of my robots. She needs to be able to read and write the code/scripts for a particular instrument. That can be a pain in the arse since we have a host of different instruments and some are pretty old and dated. Her projects for our group involve optimizing instrument/robot processes. We're always trying to make things go quicker with less manual work needed (hence the robots). She'll go to the meetings, get a list of projects, prioritize, meet with individuals, etc. She'll do her thing with the instrument (instruct via scripts of where to go and how on a given platform), work with whatever scientist who owns the machine, and then spend time validating. Of course, it's not like it goes easy and smooth. I often hear her cussing at our robots.
No, that makes perfect sense. I can get into biomedical engineering with a mechanical or engineering degree, but can I get into mechanical or electrical engineering with a biomedical engineering degree? Sound about right? Thanks!
No you can't get into electrical from biomedical..are there many undergrad programs that are biomedical specific?
You should base the your decision on what discipline fits you best, while still keeping in mind the career potentials of the field.
Example:
My universities first year engineering program was general. You apply to the specific discipline after completing the first year of courses across all the disciplines the school offered. Acceptance based on grades. The higher the potential income, the higher the number of applicants, and harder to get in.
Most schools required choose when you apply to school.
I am glad I went there (it was my safety school), because it turns out I didn't like engineering at all, the one course I liked was programming (which I had not done prior to that course). I changed out to computer science instead, graduated with a B.Sc. comp sci software engineering degree.
If I had gotten into my prefer schools, I would've landed in electrical or civil.
I joke around with my girlfriend that when people ask me "so what do you do" I should answer "I'm an engineer." When people hear "engineer" they're automatically impressed and don't ask anymore questions because most people do not know what engineers do. I'm just afraid I might say "I'm an engineer" to another engineer.
What kind of engineer were you? Sounds like telecom engineering by your description. Was it an engineering position that actually required an engineering degree from an accredited school? The reason I ask is that most telecom engineers I work with do not have an engineering degree and I don't think one is required, even today. Sometimes I wonder if they are just glorified field technicians with an "Engineering" title. Thanks for the response, btw.
There were people who did the job with experience and certs, no degree. But many of us were degreed and certified.
I joke around with my girlfriend that when people ask me "so what do you do" I should answer "I'm an engineer." When people hear "engineer" they're automatically impressed and don't ask anymore questions because most people do not know what engineers do. I'm just afraid I might say "I'm an engineer" to another engineer.
I'm a civil engineer but have some knowledge of the other engineering disciplines since the first two years or so of a B.S. degree consisted of math and science classes with the other engineering majors. Plus you develop friendship with your fellow engineers.
There is sort of a natural camaraderie between engineers. It's kind of like people in the military. If you were to say you were an engineer, I would have asked you a bunch of general to nerdy questions .
As far as my day to day duties go, I am a junior engineer working in the construction and transportation/transit industry. I assist the senior engineers in design and CAD. Not much advanced math going on. If there were any, it would be done by software. The calculations won't make sense if you don't have an understanding of them (from your education and experience).
Chemical/process engineer - it depends on what is going on. I have worked on big projects with a full disipline teams developing P&ID's, PFD's modeling, vessel and valve calculations, mass and energy ballance, some field support, detailed process control and instrumentation design, I have had to fly to toronto for a week to support a team that was helping us since I had the master plan.
Now there is not much big work going on so I work in safety items where the field goes through a plant every 5 years and identifies things that need to be worked on for safety so its not a corporate choice to fix them they have to fix them or they get fined so its pretty good job security.
Big projects are starting to come back but the economy is not flush with projects so jumping on to a project is risky because once its over they do mass lay offs.
I also make sure im spending 5 hrs a week to do continuing education, studying for my PE in the past which I now have or even go so far as to take a 3 credit class and take off for an hour twice a week (along with 20-30 hrs of homework after work lol) towards a masters in EE which is a totally separate disipline so it keeps me on my toes, but you never want your resume to get rusty, you want to be adding good certs and education as you add years of experience.
The enviornment is come and go as you please as long as you get your work done, I have 190 hrs of vacation saved and I take 2 hr lunches to work on my pilots licence or take half a day off to go on a cross country, after a PE and my undergrad pre-reqs for my EE MS I am going to do something fun and non work related.
Im sure doing EE work would be completely different, one line drawings, power line design would be really convoluded to get a matched load, my passion in EE is micro electronics like forward looking infrared. I have an amazon account and get on MIT open course ware to get books in advanced topics for chemical engineering, etc.
Just stay interested, sometimes the day to day of engineering can get boring so you have to spend an hour a day to do something like read an advanced thermodynamics text at work.
I'm a civil engineer but have some knowledge of the other engineering disciplines since the first two years or so of a B.S. degree consisted of math and science classes with the other engineering majors. Plus you develop friendship with your fellow engineers.
There is sort of a natural camaraderie between engineers. It's kind of like people in the military. If you were to say you were an engineer, I would have asked you a bunch of general to nerdy questions .
As far as my day to day duties go, I am a junior engineer working in the construction and transportation/transit industry. I assist the senior engineers in design and CAD. Not much advanced math going on. If there were any, it would be done by software. The calculations won't make sense if you don't have an understanding of them (from your education and experience).
Auto cad experience is always good to have, we did it in college but as a process engineer I never used it again, I do more advanced math than cad but when things get REALLY slow sometimes the only work there is is little pick up cad work, all the exotic project budgets get cut.
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