<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I am going to be an incoming freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I will be a chemical engineering major but I was wondering if it would be smarter to major in biomedical engineering now because the 72% job growth.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>BME’s (from what I’ve heard) don’t receive as good salaries or job offers/opportunities as ChemE majors get. However, ChemE is one of the hardest majors possible, so take those two facts into account when deciding.</p>
<p>Some chemical engineering programs have rebranded themselves as “chemical and biomolecular engineering” and perhaps thrown in a semester of biology to the course requirements.</p>
<p>If you check the career surveys at various universities, chemical engineering graduates generally do better than bioengineering graduates.</p>
<p>[RPI’s</a> career survey](<a href=“Students | Career and Professional Development”>Students | Career and Professional Development) is not as complete as [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html]those”>University Graduate Career Surveys - Career Opportunities & Internships - College Confidential Forums]those</a> at some other universities<a href=“some%20of%20which%20include%20placement%20rates%20by%20major”>/url</a>, but it does have average pay of graduates who got jobs. Biomedical engineering is the lowest paid of the engineering majors graduating in 2010 from RPI (even lower than civil engineering, which one expects to be low due to the real estate crash driven economic downturn).</p>
<p>Be aware that the closer your major is to biology, the more the masses of pre-meds who did not get into medical school will be competing for your job.</p>
<p>There are a million other threads addressing the values of BME against ChE</p>
<p>One nice thing about chemical engineering is that you can easily get into biological applications near the end of your undergraduate program, as many chemE programs (including mine), have a biotechnology concentration. The opposite (getting into the non-biological aspects of chemE near the end of your BME program) is probably a lot more difficult, as bioE’s generally take far less than chemE’s in the way of fluid mechanics, transport processes, thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, etc.</p>