Biomedical engineering: All-encompassing degree for a lucrative career
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Biomedical engineers' work includes developing artificial organs, biomaterials, medical imaging systems or clinical laboratories. They also often work with hospitals to best implement artificial intelligence and other technologies into the clinical setting. However, their work isn’t limited to a specific set of parameters, and the education required to become an engineer in the world of medicine is comprehensive.
Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, University of Virginia, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University are just a few of the top undergraduate schools offering degrees in the field.
Some recent graduates are going on to pursue medical degrees, while others are getting positions as consultants, working for start-up companies or finding jobs elsewhere in the industry.
“They really go all over the place. There’s not a stock way of thinking about it,” said Wendy Newstetter, PhD, director of learning sciences research at Georgia Tech. The curriculum for a degree in the field, she noted, is expansive, as “biomedical engineering is the liberal arts of science and technology."
While the coursework varies, one of the most important anchors in the education of a modern biomedical engineer is systems physiology, according to Newstetter.
“Students are going to be looking at the body from the tissue-organ level, down to the cell as a system,” Newstetter said. “If you think of it as a system you can intervene and take it apart as a system.”
Students taking systems physiology have exposures to several different kinds of engineering, Newstetter said. They’re required to take courses in chemistry, engineering, mechanics, as well as a high level systems modeling course. But perhaps equally important to systems physiology, she noted, is problem-based learning. Coursework for a lot of classes revolves around presenting students a problem and asking them to solve it.
For example, a recent project assigned to some students at Georgia Tech, Newstetter said, relates to football helmets and concussions. As part of the course, students are required to come up with a mathematical model of a concussion and demonstrate what happens under various kinds of collision circumstances. Then they have to get into the laboratory and develop something based on those calculations, Newstetter said.
The majority of Georgia Tech’s students in biomedical engineering end up going on to graduate school, Newstetter said, but others end up in various positions throughout the field, including some of the leaders in medical device manufacturing. Many students become clinical engineers and consultants, among other jobs.
“The vast majority of biomedical engineers end up in start-ups, which can be really good for them,” Newstetter said. “If you’re in a start-up, you’re going to learn. You quickly have to get up to speed on the regulatory environment—all kinds of things you might not have learned—then you can move up pretty rapidly because you’ve garnered a lot of skills.”
But wherever biomedical engineering students end up, statistics indicate the salaries are anything but modest.
In a recent alumni survey, Newstetter said administrators were “shocked” at the salaries some of their students were pulling in. Unable to provide exact figures because the survey wasn’t available at the time of the interview, Newstetter said many students were making six-figure salaries.
“We were very surprised at the large number of students in the alumni cohort who were making six figures,” Newstetter said. “We initially thought that group must be doctors, but it wasn’t the doctors because no one was out of med school yet.”
The field also is attractive for both genders, Newstetter noted, and for a new generation, the degree offers broad possibilities.
“It’s very attractive to women. What’s exciting about the field right now, the women [undertaking the degree at our institution] are in equal numbers to the men. Our women grads are getting gobbled up by some of the best companies in the field,” Newstetter said. “It’s really a great field for women and young men because it’s so wide-open.”