I graduated last semester with a bachelors degree in biology and I'm considering my next step as far as graduate school goes. I've been entertaining 2 main possibilities: biostats/stats and biomedical engineering. I'm leaning more towards stats because It seems like I would have to spend like 3 years studying to get an engineering bachelors degree (I've read multiple times that a biomedical degree is not as good as say getting an electrical or mechanical degree and then going into the biomedical engineering field) and then 2 more years for a masters degree (also, that's a huge amount of loans!). I have mostly two questions:
Am I right thinking that getting a biomedical degree isn’t nearly as good as getting any other engineering degree? And that it would be a huge amount of time and money?
What would be a smarter thing to do, get a masters in applied statistics or go for a biostatistics degree? My line of thinking is this: if I get a stats degree I can be a statistician in many more fields than with a biostatistics degree and I can get the same jobs as a person with a biostats degree. I would pretty much be covered when it comes to obtaining a good job and not be limited to the public health/pharmaceutical research industries. What would u guys suggest??
I don’t know much about engineering, but as a geneticist, I can say that biostaticians are in high demand, especially with the high volumes of sequencing data being generated right now. Big data is a great tool but a big challenge for most biomedical scientists. If you enjoy biostats,I would highly encourage you to pursue it!
Both are relatively exchangeable. You will see biostatisticians working as statisticians in non-health fields and vice versa. There does seem to be more demand for statisticians in the health field in my region. Although data scientists are in greater demand and have greater earning potential than both biostatisticians and applied statisticians.
^Yeah, that was going to be my comment. While an MA in statistics is probably the most easily portable, you learn the same stuff with an MS or MPH in biostatistics. The only difference is going to be the applications you learn. Also some biostatistics programs place more emphasis on certain kinds of analyses, like nonparametric statistics and survival analysis, because they are used more in the biomedical sciences.
Also, a meld is that there are many MA program in statistics that allow you to concentrate in biostatistics.
If you don’t have an engineering background, getting a statistics degree would take a lot less preparation before you could actually go to the program.
Also, data science is basically a combination of computer science and statistics. So if you go to a statistics program, you can just make sure you take solid coursework in computer science and you can still go into data science - although there are some programs popping up, there’s no specific formal degree required to be a data scientist. I know some psychologists who do data science work because they have the skills.
The posters above have given good advice regarding each field, but the red flag here to me is that you don’t know whether you want a biomedical engineering degree or a statistics/biostatistics degree, which are two very different areas. You should not be going to grad school unless you have a specific end goal in mind, ie you know what you’d like to do and whether or not you need a particular graduate degree to attain that goal.