BME: I thought I was interested

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>I thought I was interested in doing BME next year in my undergraduate years of college until I read this thread: <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/904040-what-can-i-do-biomedical-engineering-b-s-degree.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/904040-what-can-i-do-biomedical-engineering-b-s-degree.html&lt;/a>. It scared me. I am not much interested in anything else within the engineering field except for Financial Engineering/Operations Research. What can I expect to do right out of college with a BME degree from somewhere such as Yale, Penn, Columbia, or Duke (assuming I actually end up going to one of those)?</p>

<p>If I don't do BME at an engineering school without ORFE, I might just end up going and getting an economics major as that is one of my interests that is on par with my interest in engineering. </p>

<p>What should I do (especially since I must select Engineering/College of Arts And Sciences/Business school for most of the places I'm applying to)?</p>

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<p>Can anyone help?</p>

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<p>“What can I expect to do right out of college with a BME degree from somewhere such as Yale, Penn, Columbia, or Duke…”</p>

<p>Investment banking. The overwhelming majority of engineering graduates from the schools you listed do not go into engineering. They generally go to finance and consulting.</p>

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<p>Not overwhelming majority, but a significantly greater percentage than at other schools. During grad school, none of the engineering undergrads I knew at Columbia went into finance, though I’m sure there were plenty who did and I just didn’t know them.</p>

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<p>Well, at UPenn, only about 19% of engineering grads go into engineering. I don’t have the figure for Duke, but Vivek Wadhwa, an engineering professor there, has stated it is well below 50%.</p>

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<p>Not all of them go into engineering, but that doesn’t mean they all go into investment banking. Many go on to management consulting, engineering grad school, grad schools in other fields, law school, med school, project management, non-profits and so forth.</p>

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<p>What if I want to go to med school? Are the engineering curriculums at these schools too difficult to get a high GPA in, or is there no such thing?</p>

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<p>Sure, there are tons of pre-meds in BME. Most of the basic pre-med requirements (chem, orgo, bio, physics, calc) overlap with BME requirements. You can still manage a high GPA in engineering, it just might take more work than if you were to major in biology or something non-engineering.</p>

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<p>

Let’s be realistic. Even if you go to Princeton, your chance of getting into BB investment banking is still small, albeit a lot greater than people from many other schools (i.e. small chance vs ~zero chance). Even if everything is aligned perfectly, can the person grind 14hr-days?</p>

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<p>OP,
You may want to check out Northwestern which has top-12 BME, top-5 industrial engineering & management sciences, and top-10 econ. In addition, they got the following:<br>
[Kellogg</a> School Certificate Program for Undergraduates - Kellogg School of Management - Northwestern University](<a href=“http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/certificate/index.htm]Kellogg”>http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/certificate/index.htm)
[MMSS</a>, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Northwestern University](<a href=“http://www.mmss.northwestern.edu/]MMSS”>http://www.mmss.northwestern.edu/)</p>