<p>For the past few months, I have been debating whether I should
pursue a biomedical engineering or biochemistry... </p>
<p>Both seem interesting to me, but I am not quite sure if I have a clear picture of each subject... and if I enter a college and decide to switch to the other one,,,i might not be able to do so since they are in different schools usually (engineering and arts&science).</p>
<p>So could anyone explain to me what the major differences are between those two?
And which subject would yield more job prospects and opporunities? </p>
<p>Most of the people I know who majored in Biochem. went on to full-time post-grad school in Medicine, Food Sci., pharmacy, etc immediately after their B.S.--but it seems that many of the students I know in Engineering programs sought jobs with companies right after finishing their B.S. degree, and then some of them received further advanced degrees while working with the companies.</p>
<p>Biochem is a science - you study the chemical processes of living things. Biomedical engineering is design, in the engineering sense of the word, of medical and biological things, such as medical devices/imaging technologies, bio-based manufacturing materials, artificial tissue, or pharmaceuticals.</p>
<p>Both could be employed at, say, a pharmaceutical company - the biochemist to study chemical reactions within the body that lead to the diseases that the company is trying to treat, and the biomedical engineer to take the information that the biochemist has found and design the drug.</p>
<p>Realize that there is a difference between biomedical engineering, bioengineering and biomechancial engineering.</p>
<p>Biomedical would be designing biomedical devices for doctors to use in the care of patients. </p>
<p>Biomechanical could be things like artificial joints, assistive technologies for people with disabilities, prosthetic devices.</p>
<p>Bioengineering is usually synonymous with gene technology applications. </p>
<p>These descriptions are oversimplified and there is overlap between them all and tiny divisions throughout. But each has fairly different education paths and some very set areas which are exclusively their domain.</p>
<p>Bigredmed: I've always heard biomechanical described as a subset of biomedical rather than a different field altogether. Bioengineering, I've heard both ways.</p>
<p>
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do you know what schools are good for biochemistry or bioengineering?
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</p>
<p>For biomed, Johns Hopkins is hard to beat. When I applied, the admissions process for their biomedical engineering major was separate from the rest of the school. Duke, Case Western, Boston University, and Georgia Tech are also excellent. I am sure that this is not a complete list.</p>
<p>For bioengineering (I'm differentiating by whether the program seems to focus a lot on medical devices), MIT and University of Pennsylvania are excellent. I suspect that some of the biomed schools that I listed are as well. UC Berkeley is very good at something but I'm not sure whether it's more bioeng or biomed.</p>
<p>For biochem, UC San Francisco, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UC San Diego, and UTexas Southwestern are all fantastic.</p>