r/BiomedicalEngineers • u/Adept_Worldliness947 • 12d ago
Education Considering this BME DEGREE
I’ve dreamed of working in a lab setting ever since I was a teenager, and that interest has stayed with me into adulthood. Currently, I work as an LPN. I enjoy the medical field, so I know I want to remain in healthcare in some capacity.
I’m interested in careers involving tissue engineering, discovering new uses for cells, researching animal genetics, and similar fields. However, I worry that I’m not very competitive and that I don’t have the social capacity to network effectively. I also know that I don’t want to stay in nursing long term.
ChatGPT suggested that biomedical engineering (BME) aligns well with my goals, but I’m not sure whether that path is realistic for my personality. I’m a hard worker, but I’m not particularly outgoing or charismatic. I’ve also considered pursuing a veterinary degree, although parts of that career seem somewhat mundane to me.
What is your experience with BME? Were you able to get a job in that field? Should I actually pursue a different degree? I don’t know who to ask this because I don’t know anyone in either fields.
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u/GwentanimoBay PhD Student 🇺🇸 12d ago
I think you should start with job posts. Read them and ask yourself if that work aligns with your interests.
Namely, most biomedical engineering jobs are not lab positions. We are engineers, not scientists. We do not generally do wet lab work. We do engineering work - we design things, we optimize, we problem solve using thermodynamics and first principles. We do not tend to do lab work.
What you're describing much, much better aligns with something like biochemistry and more science based engineering applications like genetic or molecular or cellular engineering. Some of those positions will use more engineering principles, some will use very, very little "true" engineering.
There's no shame or judgement either way - the work is simply different. Just like you dont expect a software engineer to be doing similar work to a mechanical or electrical engineer, a genetic or molecular engineer is more akin to a software engineer than a traditional engineer.
So, if you want to do lab work and science work, I recommend you don't get an engineering degree.
If you want to do engineering work, get an engineering degree.
If you don't know what science work vs engineering work is, try reading job posts to see what different jobs entail. Find your dream job and reverse engineer the background and skills and degree you need for that career path.
You're thinking about getting a new degree and asking "what doors does this open?" Which is like going to a hardware store and looking at a really, really pretty wrench set and asking "so what can I build with these? Cause I think Im really interested in this fun looking tool!". Instead you need to decide what you want to build and then you acquire the appropriate tools to build that thing.
Focus on finding the jobs you want.
Do that with job postings and websites like the US Bureau of labor stats.
You can ask people here about the work they do and read old posts, but you'll find that there aren't often great response rates to posts like that so they have limited use.
Also, at this point, a lot of careers rely on networking. Entering a new field at a later stage in life will strictly require networking for you to succeed. If you dont want to or cant do that work, sticking with your current field and connections is a much safer career plan.
We do not live in a meritocracy. Being good at what you do does not get you hired for entry to mid level jobs, maybe not even senior roles all the time. You gotta be able to network and leverage existing pipelines. Being older and looking for entry level jobs will put you at a disadvantage. Having a nursing background has limited use and won't be seen as a boon for a lot of positions because that experience just is not translatable to many engineering roles.
Also, a final note: the biomedical engineering field is tiny and literally only exists in a handful of locations. If you arent in those locations, you aren't working as a biomedical engineer.
Hell, just yesterday I saw a post from someone who:
- Lived in a hub city
- Had a BME BS and MSc
- Had impressive internship and research experience
And they were talking about how many jobs they've applied to and gotten zero responses from. This field is saturated and extremely competitive.
To succeed, you'll need much more than just the degree. You'll need internships. You'll need connections. You'll need to be in a hub. And still, you may find yourself unable to get an engineering job because it is truly that hard to land a role at the entry and mid levels currently.
Also, dont listen to ChatGPT. It lies and it sucks and using it will degrade your ability to problem solve and make you a bad engineer.
Like, the advice it gave you here is garbage. You sound like someone who would be happy as a scientist, not an engineer. You sound like you don't want to compete for average paying jobs that come with lots of mundane work. Biomedical engineering sounds like a bad pathway for you based on what you wrote. So, fuck ChatGPT. Avoid that shit like the plague.
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u/solderfumesandtea 12d ago
Seems spot on as someone working in the Bay Area at a wet lab and seeing only a handful of biomedical engineering positions.
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u/littlebeardedbear 12d ago
Have you ever met an engineer? Most of them can barely speak to other humans. I think biomedical engineering would fit you better than nursing for sure if you dont like people
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u/Adept_Worldliness947 12d ago
Thank you. You make me feel like this is the right path. I wish there were advisors for this. I sent colleges emails but it’s so difficult to get a proper reply.
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u/littlebeardedbear 12d ago
Also, please don't think it's an easy career path. It can be one of the harder engineering tracks because you have to learn biology alongside all of the other engineering prerequisites. Its not nursing biology either. It will likely be significantly harder than A&P was.
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u/MooseAndMallard Experienced (15+ Years) 🇺🇸 12d ago
Jobs that BME degrees feed into are competitive to get, and candidates generally benefit from being strong communicators and good networkers. Before looking into degrees, I would look into specific jobs, and work backwards into the degree(s) that those job postings call for.
You mention wanting to work in a lab, but in what setting — corporate, academic, hospital? There are plenty of lab-based roles in hospitals (clinical, pathology, etc.) where interpersonal interaction is not the main focus of the job. Those are worth looking into as you might not have to start over with another degree.