My daughter (and I as the chaperone) had the opportunity to attend the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting last year held at Atlanta, Georgia as part of the few High School Expo participants. We eventually attended the Engineering Info Session at GeorgiaTech on the same week. From what I gathered, graduates from engineering programs with co-op experiences are highly employable even with only a bachelor’s degree. However, if you are just a bachelors degree holder from a subpar university and no actual work experience, employment is difficult. Most of them usually aim for postgraduate degrees. I also had a colleague at work, who was a ChemEng graduate from GATech. I told him about my daughter’s plan. He highly recommended taking advantage of the coop program. He did not do it, and regretted it.
@floridakiddo
Although most BME students at WPI are not “co-op” students, they all have extensive project experience by the University design.
Once again, instead of general statements, look for some data.
Go to the following website to see the job and graduate school placement for BME from WPI for 2018. On page 13 of this PDF report, the average salaries, employers and graduate schools are listed for 2018. The concentration of BME activity is very high in the Boston area.
As BS graduates in BME, 51 took jobs (see listing) while 22 went to graduate school. Yes, a lot of BMEs appear to go on to graduate school, but the other 70% took jobs with a wide range of organizations. Many of these companies are not household names which would be familiar to the consumer. This is, in some parts of the country, a rapidly expanding industry.
As already referenced above, look at https://www.wpi.edu/student-experience/career-development/outcomes
That’s helpful info. It’s not as different from WPI Mech Eng (p 45) as I would have expected. The 90% + placement rates are impressive.
I do think it can be more difficult to land internships in bio/ biomedical engineering than other areas of engineering. My daughter graduated from Cornell in bio engineering. Both freshman and sophomore years, she wound up finding internships through networking as the placement office had nothing. Although wonderful learning opportunities, they did not pay well. Meanwhile, her peers in other engineering fields were landing high paying internships and jobs in the fall and early spring. Her summer job before senior year was researching in a Cornell lab. Graduated with honors but no job. Again, worked hard on the job hunt and landed a great position after 4 months. Loved her job (and was well compensated) but after 3 years in the industry, she opted to pursue a phd at Harvard.
This was in stark contrast to our younger daughter’s experience in chemical engineering at Purdue. She had several well paying internships and co-op opportunities to choose from and all were generated through Purdue’s placement office. Her current job was secured in the September prior to graduation. It is with the company she interned with the summer between junior and senior year.
Best of luck to your daughter.
I’ve heard mixed things about BME job prospects. When I was in the major (for only one semester), the advisors said they had pretty good rates of kids being hired or going to medical school right out of college. I live in Utah, which is trying to build up their biomed industry though, so that might be part of that. Online I have heard a lot of people saying it is more difficult to get a job in biomed without a masters, so just keep that in mind. Going to an elite school would probably raise her chances.
As it has been said above, biomed is a pretty broad field. This makes it hard to major in, but it also makes it easy to enter the field with a different degree. For example, I’ve switched to Electrical Engineering and once I graduate I could get a job with a biomedical engineering company working on biomedical devices. I would just be working on a specific aspect of them (electrical) but you’re going to have some kind of emphasis in biomedical engineering anyway. Same applies with mechanical and chemical engineering at least. Those three degrees are more widely marketable (to my understanding) but can still get you hired by a biomedical engineering company. And then you can do BME for Master’s.
Just my two cents
When we visited Pitt, they said that finding coops locally for the BMEs was difficult because they only had partnerships with six local companies that took BMEs. So BMEs at Pitt have to cast a wide net to land Co-op positions.
My daughter will be starting her freshman year this week with a biomedical engineering major. Based on the research she has done, she is fully prepared to have to go to graduate school in order to secure a job in her field. Best of luck to your daughter! 
My daughter is starting her junior year as a bioengineering major at University of Maryland. She has had no problems getting internships or jobs, so far. She has had 3 different lab internships over the past 3 summers and had a work study in a research lab last school year which she will continue this year. She has been to several job fairs at UMD where recruiters are looking for bioegineers. Like others have posted, I’m not sure if there is more of a demand because of the area we live in, but it seems like she should be able to get a job with her undergrad degree.
@Gumbymom it may be a small world. If I’m right then your best friend’s daughter’s name begins with an A. If I’m wrong then this is still a good story for others to hear.
In my Marketing/Product Marketing group about 4 years ago we hired a 4.0 gpa sophomore Biomedical Engineering student at UCSD for an internship. We had two internship spots and we were expecting to recruit both of them from SDSU’s masters program in Biomedical Engineering. Our company is a big medical device and hospital-use disposable products company (e.g. All the products used for blood draws at hospitals). One candidate from SDSU backed out after accepting the position (they were an international student and maybe decided it could interfere with their studies or travel needs. We never really found out.) A sophomore from UCSD had been in contact with our HR department about the potential of an internship and HR sent us her resume. We hired her and everything was great. Other departments learned about our engineer intern in the Marketing department and that lead to her Engineering internship the following year. We were all happy she came back to the same company and it didn’t matter that she went to a different department for her 2nd internship (in fact we didn’t have an official internship program in Marketing the 2nd year although I’m sure we could have gotten approval to hire her again.) Her family was further North in California and after graduation she took a job with a division of our company located closer to her parents/family. After that I lost track of her.
The reason I’m sharing this story is to say that she is the one who got the internship by being in contact with the HR department of target companies and it didn’t negatively affect her career aspirations to accept an internship at a target company even though it wasn’t in her desired area (Marketing/Product Marketing instead of Engineering).
@diegodavis: Not the same person but a similar story.