The other day I was reflecting on the thought that next year it will be a decade since I began my undergraduate degree. I have completed both my undergrad and master’s degree in biomedical engineering and during that time I have learned some valuable lessons.
Disclaimer: this advice is based on my own experience graduating and entering the job market. Looking back, I want to go over 5 things that I wish I knew before majoring in biomedical engineering:
1. Jack of all trades: You might hear this term when attributed to biomedical engineering. It might be a result of the intersection that exists at the root of this degree which is medicine and engineering. Therefore, some programs consist of a mismatch of different courses. Some electrical engineering courses, some mechanical engineering courses and pre-med courses. In addition, you might not be focused on a specific stream because you might be interested in creating electrical devices and that needs both mechanical and electrical engineering knowledge.
Therefore, this might result in acquiring surface knowledge of many different disciplines and not a deep-dive into a specific focus which might be why at the end of the degree it feels as though you are “a jack of all trades, master of none” because you have obtained small bits of knowledge from multiple disciplines. This was my experience at the end of my degree and resulted in me applying for my masters immediately after finishing my undergraduate degree because I felt that I needed to specialize in a specific area of biomedical engineering, where I ended up specializing in health data and health informatics.
2. Need to sell your skills to get a job: Selling your skills was truly important when graduating from my undergraduate degree, not only will your degree to some, be completely unknown as it is relatively new compared to established engineering degrees, such as civil and mechanical engineering. In addition, recruiters and people who don’t have an understanding of the field might doubt your capabilities to do an engineering job, with a degree in biomedical engineering, when the role might might have competition from people with more common engineering degrees (i.e., civil, mechanical, industrial engineering).
I’ll never forget what my friend told me, who also was studying biomedical engineering, when she went to an engineering recruitment fair and when she told the recruiter what her degree was in, the recruiter gave her a blank stare and told her “good luck with that” 😑 It’s difficult out there in these job market streets, when it comes to getting entry-level roles as people are not as willing to train individuals and are looking for even entry-level folks in some cases to have 2-3 years of experience, so they might not want to take a risk on you.
3. Can be difficult to find an internship: Speaking of experience and now this point is highly dependent on your location, where I am based I found it difficult to get an internship or co-op experience during my undergraduate degree at a company that was relevant to biomedical engineering. This might be again because the program is relatively new and there are not as many internship positions available or the number of companies are limited.
Whereas other friends who were in the co-op or internship programs in mechanical and electrical engineering had an easier time finding relevant internship opportunities due to the greater number of positions available. I was lucky to find an internship opportunity at a hospital but it was really competitive and took me a few tries to get in! Given the fact that these days any type of experience even with entry-level roles is such a leg-up in this competitive job market, I found many of my friends took internships in electrical and mechanical-based companies not necessarily doing biomedical engineering work but just to get work experience which is invaluable at that stage.
4. Important to tailor your job search: When it comes to looking for jobs, you want to have an understanding of common skills that are requested by employers (e.g., experience with Power BI, SQL) rather than just relying on the skills they teach you in school such as MATLAB, which might not be relevant to the industry you are interested in. One thing I wish I knew was, how important it is to learn technical skills in addition to the theoretical knowledge you are exposed to in university. Prior to graduating, I wish I would have looked at the skills that were in top demand such as R, Python, SQL and Power BI and done my own self-learning before looking for a job.
I think I was very focused on the soft skill questions they will ask you during job interviews such as “What are your greatest weaknesses?” which career guidance programs at school do well in preparing you for but if you are looking for a more technical job, it’s also important to have some experience with popular technical skills. Many of these programs are open source such as R and Python and when you are in school and have some extra free time, this is a great time to work on projects that you can link to in your resume and have something to talk about. In school we were more focused on learning MATLAB which is a good tool to learn but a tool such as R, Python and SQL would have been more relevant for the path I would be going down. If you want to learn how to use Power BI and healthcare data and build you own clinical business intelligence portfolio project you can check out the video below:
5. Minoring or Joint Degree in Biomedical Engineering, My last tip is to maybe look at doing a joint degree in biomedical engineering or majoring in a more established program such as computer/software engineering and minoring in biomedical engineering. I think at that age I was very much into absolutes, I like biomedical engineering so I am doing this program, not knowing that life can be flexible and it’s quite common to change your degree and change your career but I think I was stuck in the mindset that you must make one decision and stick to it, until the end of time.
Overall, I don’t regret doing my degree in biomedical engineering, I still am very passionate about the healthcare field and work in health informatics which is very much related to my degree but I think there are benefits to doing a joint degree because it allows you to pivot and not be siloed into one specific stream. If one part of your degree is more employable than the other, you can definitely play up that side more. Therefore, if I could go back in time I would do a joint degree.
I hope these tips can be helpful to you when considering if a degree in biomedical engineering is right for you!
0 Comments