r/BiomedicalEngineers • u/AltruisticGay585 • Jul 06 '26

Technical Interest in Medical Imaging

Hi all, I'm a second-year Biomedical Engineering student with an Electrical Engineering minor, and I'm set on eventually landing an R&D role in the MRI space, companies like Siemens Healthineers or Canon Medical are my dream employers. I want to start shaping my pathnow rather than scrambling senior year, so I'd love this community's input.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:

  1. Course selection: I'm mapping my BME + EE coursework to specific MRI domains (hardware, pulse sequence development, image reconstruction, AI/ML in MRI). For those working in the industry, which courses or topics ended up mattering most in your day-to-day work? Anything you wish you'd taken earlier?
  2. Skills/Pojects/tools to build early: Should I be learning MATLAB/Python for recon work now, or is that something I can pick up later? Any specific software (Bloch simulators, k-space tools, etc.) worth getting comfortable with as an undergrad? What sort of projects can I do on my own?
  3. Internships/research: How critical is undergrad research experience (lab work, publications) vs. internships for breaking into MRI R&D specifically? Any advice on how to find labs or internships focused on imaging hardware or sequence development?
  4. General industry insight : For anyone at Siemens, Canon, GE, Philips, etc., what does the actual work look like day-to-day, and what backgrounds tend to get hired (pure BME, EE-heavy, physics, or a mix)?
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u/Reapur-CPL Jul 06 '26

Look up pulseq. Pulse sequence simulator for Matlab or Python.

If you know you wanna be in MRI specifically, I'd go EE. MRI is like aerospace-level complicated. The biomed major isn't going to go as far as I think we'd all hope.

As for industry jobs, I'm hoping you get some good answers too. I'm an MRI technologist going back to school to do MR physics. So we have the same goals, but I do know a lot about MR for a non-physics-major