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What would you recommend in the biomedical engineering field.

I just am curious about the different jobs in the field.

biomedical-engineering bioengineering
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Victoria’s Answer

There are tons of different career options for a degree in biomedical engineering (BME)! It really depends where your interests lie and what you hope to do over the course of your career. Some people who study BME may go in to working at a medical device company where they focus on designing, testing, and quality improvement. As an example, these people may design prosthetics or hip and knee replacements. Other people may choose to work in a lab setting where they are developing new drugs or working on innovative approaches to address unmet needs by coming up with new ways to grow human tissues and organs. Others may go in to roles that are less focused on science, and are more blended with business. As an example, someone who studied drug development during school may work in the clinical operations group at a clinical research organization (CRO), a pharmaceutical company, or a biotechnology firm. In this case, you can use the skills and knowledge you built during your college career as reference for designing clinical trials and business processes to improve outcomes. As a last example, you could chose to go into consulting. While this is typically a role that people go in to after gaining some industry experience, it is possible for undergrads to go directly into consulting. In this role, you would use your BME knowledge to advise clients on how to complete different strategic and / or transformational projects for their organizations. Over time, you would build up more on-the-job knowledge and be able to hone your advice to better serve clients in the future. Really, the possibilities are endless! Be clear about what interests you and the skills you have, and think about how those can translate over to different areas.
Thank you comment icon This was super helpful, thank you! Jada
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Brian’s Answer

BME jobs are not one-size fits all. There are some many different jobs that it would be hard to recommend a job without knowing your interests and passions. One thing I'd like to add to Victoria's assessment, which is applicable to a lot of different degrees, is I think it is important to figure out what type of lifestyle you want to have. Do you want to work in an office with the same coworkers every day? Do you want to work remotely? Do you want to be in a hospital setting working with patients? Do you want to travel for work? Do you want to work from a computer or have a job that is literally hands-on? As a BME, you can pick as jobs span all of these different lifestyles.

By starting with this lifestyle piece you can quickly narrow down certain job opportunities. For example, if you love to travel and want to work with patients (lets assume cardiac anatomy interests you), you could consider working for a company like Medtronic, Boston Scientific, or Abbott who develop and sell pacemakers and defibrillators. You would get to drive around a region (think metropolitan area or half a state in some circumstances) and support the implantation of pacemakers and get to interact with patients, nurses, physicians, etc. You'd be on your feet all day with a lot of small talk. Conversely, if you hate interacting with new people and want to have set working hours to create a work/life balance that works for you, maybe you take a job as an engineer working for one of those companies in-house. In-house engineers have a HUGE variety of jobs. For example, you could be a Design Engineer who is working on the actual design of a new product or a Reliability Engineer who analyzes all the ways a product can fail and tries to determine how reliable the product is so that they can mitigate potential areas of concern prior to it's use in patients.

In my experience, having a BME degree creates an enormous amount of different job opportunities. I'd start by identifying what type of lifestyle you want to have and what anatomical system interests you the most (circulatory system, respiratory system, nervous system, etc.). By identifying those two things you can then start looking at companies who create or sell a product that interacts with your anatomical system of interest. Once you have that you can begin looking at what job opportunities are for that particular product (sales force, in-house engineer (Systems, Design, Safety, Reliability, Human Factors)).
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