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KetTarma posted:Everything I have ever heard about BME from all of my research, reading this thread, etc says that the bare minimum for an entry level BME job is a master's degree. I don't mind moving.
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Jun 8, 2013 13:55
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Since you haven't started your engineering classes yet, you might want to consider instead going with a more generic (and marketable) mechanical engineering or electrical engineering degree with a focus in BME. This will still leave the door open for you for BME jobs, but considering how tight that market is, will leave you other options as well.
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Jun 8, 2013 14:40
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Here, I will do a thing for you: http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/biomedical-engineers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/mechanical-engineers.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/electrical-and-electronics-engineers.htm Read through these for some statistics/info. I'm assuming that you're kind of torn between BME/ME/EE.
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Jun 8, 2013 14:45
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KetTarma posted:Here, I will do a thing for you:
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Jun 8, 2013 14:48
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Grovedawg, I thought you were the one that had taken all of the high end statistics classes.  BLS says that there are 15,700 BMEs in America while there are 294,000 EEs and 243,000 MEs. The d/dt is higher because the start point is much smaller than the other fields.
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Jun 8, 2013 15:12
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KetTarma posted:Grovedawg, I thought you were the one that had taken all of the high end statistics classes.
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Jun 8, 2013 15:24
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Hm, good point. Do you think it's possible that there's a minimum cap based on paying back student loans/cost of living going on? I know most BMEs live in either California or New England which traditionally have relatively high costs of living.
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Jun 8, 2013 15:46
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grover posted:Wow, that's pretty impressive job growth outlook for BME. What's with all the stories here about it being impossible to find a BME job? Or is there more to it that BLS stats let on? within the past year i have interviewed multiple people with masters in BME from top 10 schools who couldn't find jobs doing BME and decided to do software instead.
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Jun 8, 2013 16:07
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hieronymus posted:within the past year i have interviewed multiple people with masters in BME from top 10 schools who couldn't find jobs doing BME and decided to do software instead.
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Jun 8, 2013 16:17
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So from what I gather, Biomedical is like, the hardest engineering, and yet has the worst job prospects? That really sucks.
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Jun 8, 2013 16:18
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grover posted:Is the market simply oversaturated from job loss during the recression, which just hasn't had time to significantly deflate salaries? And "growth" more an artifact of recovering recently lost jobs than actual growth? I think there just isn't much of a reason to hire BMEs because they don't really specialize in anything. My school has a BME program and from what I understand they do a little circuit design, a little ME design and a few other things but still end up worse at EE stuff than an EE and worse at ME stuff than an ME so there is just no reason to hire them.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:00
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an skeleton posted:So from what I gather, Biomedical is like, the hardest engineering, and yet has the worst job prospects? That really sucks.  The popular choice for "hardest" engineering major is normally aerospace I say this while holding an aerospace degree so I'm not biased at allIn a lot of places, biomedical is a brand new program - I know the one at Virginia Tech just started up in 2000. You'll hear professors crow about it being such an expanding field but, practically, you want an undergraduate degree that gives you as much flexibility as possible. If you're set on the biomedical field/bioimaging or whatever, that's great, but know that it may be better for your actual career prospects to get a bachelors in mechanical and then go to grad school for biomedical - especially since most engineers now will likely get an ME or an MS anyway. It seems like most of the jobs marked as entry level for biomedical you could do just as well with a mechanical degree with some emphasis on statistical coursework.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:02
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Kolodny posted:
 The most difficult is generally considered to be the multidisciplinary engineering majors- the ones that include the hardest core courses of electrical, mechanical, aero, civil and nuclear so that students end up spanning the disciplines. The only schools I know of that have this type of major, have it as honors-only and it usually chutes right into grad school for specialization. I don't think any particular field is any harder than any other; it's just a matter of what individual people find easy/hard. Some have trouble wrapping their head around electrical or fluids because it's a little more esoteric, but the actual math/engineering isn't any worse than mechanical, just different. Most engineers will agree, though, that industrial is the easiest engineering. Personally, I enjoyed electrical and fluids; fun stuff. I loved the quantum physics side and the interaction at the atomic level for crack propagation and subatomic level for semiconductors. grover fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Jun 8, 2013 |
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Jun 8, 2013 17:27
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I think there just isn't much of a reason to hire BMEs because they don't really specialize in anything. My school has a BME program and from what I understand they do a little circuit design, a little ME design and a few other things but still end up worse at EE stuff than an EE and worse at ME stuff than an ME so there is just no reason to hire them. Yeah my BE degree left me with a little bit of circuit knowledge, a little bit of arduino, a little bit of matlab, and a little bit of statistics. I never really took a full class, or more than one class, in any of those so I don't really know what I'm doing. My school relies on the "our students are smarter than most, they'll figure it out on their own"
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Jun 8, 2013 17:35
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grover posted:The hardest part about aero is finding a job. it's true 
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Jun 8, 2013 17:44
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Aero is def not harder than EE and not harder than Chem E, imo. On par with mechanical which is what I am.
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Jun 8, 2013 17:58
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Thoguh fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Jun 8, 2013 18:19
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Thoguh posted:Them's fighting words. That's not true where I go to school. Aero is fluids heavy mechanical.
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Jun 8, 2013 18:32
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As an Aero, gently caress EE and ChemE. That poo poo is difficult and boring. Any applications engineers around? Starting my first official post-grad job next Monday as an applications engineer working on avionics. I have an OK grasp on what I'll be doing but before I applied to the job back in January I'd never heard of applications engineering before.
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Jun 8, 2013 18:36
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Booties posted:Yeah my BE degree left me with a little bit of circuit knowledge, a little bit of arduino, a little bit of matlab, and a little bit of statistics. I never really took a full class, or more than one class, in any of those so I don't really know what I'm doing. My school relies on the "our students are smarter than most, they'll figure it out on their own" Yeah that is the point in the end you still have to specialize yourself in a specific subject like bio-electronics or bio-mechanics, otherwise you will probably feel that you know everything but are still quite incompetent to do a research project.
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Jun 8, 2013 18:49
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Slark posted:Yeah that is the point in the end you still have to specialize yourself in a specific subject like bio-electronics or bio-mechanics, otherwise you will probably feel that you know everything but are still quite incompetent to do a research project. Yuuuuuup. Every single research hospital wants MS or PhD people. CROs want tons of experience or MS. Everyone else is hiring all kinds of engineers except BMEs. I have a third, on-site interview on Friday for a sales engineer position at a company that manufactures and sells very small motors used in hand held surgical and dental equipment. At least it's technically medical device experience and worth it for the connections and experience, but I feel like this is still very far from what I studied. I also don't want to go to grad school for research because I kinda don't give a poo poo about it anymore. I might just say gently caress it and try and get an MBA somewhere.
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Jun 8, 2013 19:56
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THE RED MENACE posted:As an Aero, gently caress EE and ChemE. That poo poo is difficult and boring. Instead of designing the systems you'll be working with customers to tailor/configure the systems to their application. Applications engineering can be interchangeable with sales engineer. For instance, my business cards say "sales engineer" but my official title at the company is "field application engineer" because I occasionally travel.
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Jun 8, 2013 20:38
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I am starting my first internship on monday, y'all got any general advice you wish you know or you wish your interns knew before they showed up? My plan right now is to try and be relentlessly positive and kiss rear end, network, and try not to break anything.
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Jun 8, 2013 21:47
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Thoguh fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Aug 10, 2023 |
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Jun 8, 2013 22:06
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Test engineering for an aero company
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Jun 8, 2013 22:26
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I'm training an intern right now. All I want from an intern is eagerness, patience, and a willingness to at least try to solve a problem on their own before asking me for help. I don't mind helping, I just don't want to have to ask "did you try looking on google?" every single time.
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Jun 8, 2013 22:29
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mokhtar belmokhtar posted:When a job posting asks for skills with SAP, is there a specific product they make used by engineers or does it just depend? What kind of an engineer are you? While SAP is a business software provider/suite, SAP 2000 (often just referred to as SAP) is a piece of relatively popular structural analysis software made by someone else entirely.
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Jun 8, 2013 22:30
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rockamiclikeavandal posted:I am starting my first internship on monday, y'all got any general advice you wish you know or you wish your interns knew before they showed up? My plan right now is to try and be relentlessly positive and kiss rear end, network, and try not to break anything. If you get asked to do something that you don't know how to do (and can't look it up on your own) don't be afraid to ask (and ask earlier rather than wait). You're an intern, so you're not expected to know much practical stuff at all for how they do things.
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Jun 9, 2013 04:02
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I think there just isn't much of a reason to hire BMEs because they don't really specialize in anything. My school has a BME program and from what I understand they do a little circuit design, a little ME design and a few other things but still end up worse at EE stuff than an EE and worse at ME stuff than an ME so there is just no reason to hire them. This is the problem - my experience at my company is that the researchers tend to be either medical doctors or straight phDs in biology/whatever. The hardware engineers tend to specialize in EE/Computer engineering. The software people have more flexibility but more likely than not studied CS. So the BME people actually don't fit into a lot of companies that actually do BME type stuff (I work at a medical informatics/medical device company.)
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Jun 9, 2013 04:17
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Yeah, if you were actually developing something and building a small team you'd much rather have 1 ME, 1 EE, 1 software dude, and 1 Bio dude that knows the science than 4 BMEs who don't really have any depth in any one area. And that relationship pretty much scales up the larger the team is. Well, maybe fewer scientists.
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Jun 9, 2013 05:11
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hieronymus posted:This is the problem - my experience at my company is that the researchers tend to be either medical doctors or straight phDs in biology/whatever. The hardware engineers tend to specialize in EE/Computer engineering. The software people have more flexibility but more likely than not studied CS. So the BME people actually don't fit into a lot of companies that actually do BME type stuff (I work at a medical informatics/medical device company.) am i correct in assuming, biomedical engineering is not traditional in the sense that your massive corporations that employ engineers have no place for it? biomedical engineers are inherently in the medical industry or "pure sciences", they don't really fit in with aerospace, manufacturing, electronics, building, or heavy industry hiring paradigms. Sure there are places like Medtronic and where you work. When you are in say an electronics design/manufacture company, it is "run" by engineers. For biomed, you are under MDs, science PHDs? Hierarchy is based on pedigree and the letters after your name. With just an undergrad degree a BME will just be a tech to them. Why is it that biochem BSs get jobs cleaning glassware for minimum wage, when an engineering BS acquires jobs starting at 60k? I don't think we are any smarter than them, I feel its due the cultural and funding structure of medicine and pure sciences. An electrical engineer can probably work anywhere, for any industry. a biomed engineer only has a limited amount of places that will utilize their talents correctly. CatchrNdRy fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 09:55
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How can I make myself more attractive as a biomedical engineering student? pick something very specific and focus on it? get a comp sci minor? sacrifice a goat to the Engineering gods?
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Jun 10, 2013 11:02
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Every professional I have ever spoke with has told me that minors are worthless outside of the satisfaction you get from doing it.
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Jun 10, 2013 13:52
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CatchrNdRy posted:am i correct in assuming, biomedical engineering is not traditional in the sense that your massive corporations that employ engineers have no place for it? biomedical engineers are inherently in the medical industry or "pure sciences", they don't really fit in with aerospace, manufacturing, electronics, building, or heavy industry hiring paradigms. Sure there are places like Medtronic and where you work. If a position gets filled with lots of PhDs then later people will assume that it needs a phd. Then the Masters end up in the assistants jobs. Then people think that the assistant has to be a Master. And the Bachelor can only start as a glasswasher. Now this mainly impacts fields where you have those PhD graduates going into the industry in significant numbers. Which is why in fields where PhDs are rare ( most classic engineering fields) this doesn't happen as much.
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Jun 10, 2013 14:43
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an skeleton posted:How can I make myself more attractive as a biomedical engineering student? pick something very specific and focus on it? get a comp sci minor? sacrifice a goat to the Engineering gods? Change your major  Get as much experience as you possibly can be it internships or research.
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Jun 10, 2013 15:27
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movax posted:Change your major Ugh. This is so discouraging! I guess I will seriously have to give Electrical Engineering some thought...
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Jun 10, 2013 15:31
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an skeleton posted:How can I make myself more attractive as a biomedical engineering student? pick something very specific and focus on it? get a comp sci minor? sacrifice a goat to the Engineering gods? A CS minor* is one of the better ones. You can get a lot of jobs with any random degree and knowing how to program, but specializing to compete for a subset of those 15,700 positions is a losing proposition. * Just make sure your school will actually cover programming in their coursework and not focus entirely on computational theory, that's not what you're there for. Blorange fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jun 10, 2013 |
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Jun 10, 2013 15:37
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an skeleton posted:Ugh. This is so discouraging! I guess I will seriously have to give Electrical Engineering some thought... If you're really into biomed, as people have mentioned you could always jump through the hoops and do it as a graduate degree. Doing EE/ME as an undergrad I would argue would be more likely to get you a job if for some reason you do not decide to go on with the graduate degree. Experience really trumps all though; I'm just a BSEE and have interviewed/gotten offers at positions where they have waived the MS/PhD requirement. I'd argue that outside of some esoteric or pure bleeding edge research/academic scenarios, a year spent in industry at a decent company where you have a chance to innovate/do your thing will teach you a lot more than an equivalent time spent in school.
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Jun 10, 2013 15:38
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hieronymus posted:within the past year i have interviewed multiple people with masters in BME from top 10 schools who couldn't find jobs doing BME and decided to do software instead. This is me, most good BME programs have TONS of scientific programming that ends up being a marketable skill. an skeleton, do not get a BME BS, do not pass go. 70% of my graduating class went to grad school and those that got jobs are all either software devs or business strategy consultants. That said, the business strategy consulting guys seem pretty happy and I'm enjoying being in software.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:28
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So after an aborted attempt at being a Mechanic, I've decided to switch tacks and become that which I have often cursed: an Engineer. Obviously I enjoy cars, but I've also got a passion for aerospace, specifically the space side of the spectrum. Talking with my counselor, we've decided that for the time being Mechanical is the way to go, as according to them if I decide I want to do aerospace it's easier to switch than starting as an Aerospace major and going the other way. Does this sound about right as far as education goes? Which one would give me better job prospects in that field? Obviously Mechanical is going to have broader appeal if I can't find work in that specific industry, just wanted the Goon opinion on which would be a better choice.
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Jun 10, 2013 16:34
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