Biomedical engineering is the intersection between medicine and engineering. The core of engineering is all about identifying and solving problems and if we apply this concept to biomedical engineering, this field is about identifying and solving problems within healthcare. Biomedical engineering is a huge field and has many pathways. My own experience in this field is, I studied biomedical engineering in both my undergraduate and masters degree.
In my own schooling there were multiple pathways or areas of specialization that you could follow in this broad field of biomedical engineering; you could focus on the mechanical engineering stream, building prosthetics and surgical robots or you could focus on an electrical engineering stream, building the electronic components found in hospitals such as: pacemakers or ultrasound machines.
I chose to specialize in the electronic pathway during my undergrad and then made a complete shift in my masters to health informatics which is focused on using healthcare data stemming from a variety of sources: EKGs, ECGs, lab tests, MRIs, CT and PET scans, to help clinicians make decisions.
In my masters, my research was focused on using machine learning algorithms to predict or flag a potential risk of premature birth
Growth projections?
According to CareerPlanner, this career field is expected to grow by 7% between 2016 to 2026 and this is an average growth rate compared to the other occupations surveyed. This field may experience growth as the baby boomer population continues to age; there will be a greater demand on the healthcare sector for a need for innovative, creative solutions to help people live in their homes longer and increase patient outcomes and survival. For instance, there has been research in the area of automating instances where seniors fall and have that information directly transmitted to devices.
Even now during the pandemic we see the need for fast and accurate reporting of the spread of the virus in the form of clinical dashboards and the rise of telemedicine for booking virtual doctor’s appointments. Therefore, I believe the growth projections for this field are trending upwards.
How to find possible careers?
Finding a job in this field is not easy, because this is a new field and healthcare is often slow to technically advance, jobs can be sparse and difficult to find. You can find jobs in hospitals which have a biomedical or clinical engineering department or you can work for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. The major players in this field are: Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Philips Healthcare, GE Healthcare, Abbott Labs, Johnson & Johnson & Siemens.
It’s also important to know how to market your skills if you want to transition into a career which is focused on mechanical or electrical engineering instead of purely biomedical engineering. I remember going to a career fair and recruiters had never heard of my degree and were more interested in the electrical engineering students even though we had taken similar courses.
My advice to you if you’re thinking of getting into this field but are not 100% sure about biomedical engineering is to take a multidisciplinary approach and get a joint degree in biomedical & electrical or biomedical & mechanical engineering, so you can fall back on either one when looking for jobs instead of, going through a pure biomedical engineering program if you’re not 100% sure you want to work in the field.
Another question I have received from students is if I would advice studying biomedical engineering as a route to enter medical school. This is an admirable path but my one caveat is that biomedical engineering is NOT academically easy and if you are looking for a high GPA to get into med school biomedical engineering might not be the best route. However, I did take relevant courses such as pathology and anatomy thus this might be the correct path for you to enter med school.
I believe the field of biomedical engineering is a rewarding field because your work directly attempts to improve patient’s health outcomes and has the potential to help thousands of people. I think of the impact that the pacemaker had and continues to have on people’s lives, which was invented by Canadian engineer John Hopps. John Hopps stated to CBC in 1984, “In those days there wasn’t much rapport between engineering and medicine, and I think that was one of the real problems in our research. The medical people didn’t know the potential of engineering to assist them. And we knew nothing at all about the medical problems”. Innovative solutions will come from people who have knowledge of both medicine and engineering.
Why should you become a biomedical engineering?
I don’t think that you should study biomedical engineering for just the potential high pay because as I said before it can be quite competitive and can take a while to break into this field. We are aware of the frustrating trend of entry level roles requiring 2-5 years of experience even though these are roles that should be for people who have finished school and are looking for experience to get their foot into the door and I don’t think the field of biomedical engineering is immune to this.
Therefore you might have to work in another field to get experience and translate those skills to a career in biomedical engineering in the future. For instance, you might work for an electronics company or a technician role before you can use your experience to break into this field due to its competitive nature and availability of jobs.
Advice I would give to people interested in this field is to look at the LinkedIn titles of people who are biomedical engineers you might see the same trend that I observed which was that many of these individuals did not have a linear path of studying biomedical engineering in school and then immediately getting a job in biomedical engineering. Many people worked in different fields, developed transferable skills and then ended up within the biomedical engineering field.
What are some transferable skills you could learn? I will speak to the field I am interested in which is health informatics, this is all about using data to improve clinical outcomes but there are transferable skills that you could gain in an entry level field and then transfer them to the healthcare field.
For instance, understanding how to write SQL queries and learning how to extract data from large databases, developing your analytical and statistics or biostatistics skills, knowing how to communicate your data insights to non-technical people. These are blanket skills needed in the financial, hospitality and healthcare fields.
I finished listening to a book called Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world by David Epstein and he gave great examples where people who have interests in several different fields have the ability to solve problems creatively and sometimes even better than those who are specialized in specific fields. To illustrate this I have listed an excerpt from the book below:
“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
I think there is definitely a benefit for people who are interested in the field of both engineering and healthcare because it allows us to think about problems differently from those who might just be pure engineers or pure healthcare professionals. People in this field lie in the intersection of these areas and I believe that creative and innovative problems will originate from us.
Check out the podcast on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts! 
1 Comment
JOHN MULINDI · February 24, 2021 at 7:20 pm
I think this is a developing field and also seems to be more advanced in developed countries. So I would say that in countries like USA, Germany, UK where most of the medical systems and equipment are designed and manufactured, you have a high chance of landing a good job as a Biomedical Engineer whilst in developing countries who only import these equipment the career options for Biomedical Engineer might be fewer as it only involves maintenance and or operational done mostly in a medical facility like Hospital set up.