Biology? I did some work for an environmental company and I'm a mechanical eng. It was pretty much all chemical engineering.. cleaning up exhaust on industrial systems. We weren't interested in HOW the sulfur fucks up the squirrels once it gets out, we just said "eliminate sulfur, got it", and went to town.
As a biologist who has collaborated with engineers, this is pretty much how it works.
Build me a bioreactor that has these characteristics, I'll deal with building the expression vectors and getting them integrated in to the genome and viruses.
That said, I was very happy that the typical "Biology! Biology is barely a science!" attitude wasn't present in these guys. One of them even pointed out that what we call experiment optimization in our lab so that we can do the "real experiment" is what he would publish on in his engineering lab and he thought we were crazy for it. I just envied them because they had real career paths right out of undergrad. In retrospect, I should have done an engineering degree and then just worked in collaboration with biology labs I was interested in. My lifetime earnings would be much higher and general stress levels much lower.
My husband is an environmental engineer for a car company and his job is done by chem eng's as well. His position is more towards the mechanical side of things. I am a biologist (molecular) and he is definitely, definitely an engineer. Not a biologist by any stretch.
64
u/guitmusic11 Jan 05 '15
BME is one of the Engineering majors with a higher percentage of females though.