Case BME - Capstone is failing its students

Colleges and Universities A-Z Case Western Reserve University
1

I am an BME student currently going through BME senior capstone at Case. I have found this experience especially miserable.

  1. No technical advisers -In the EE/CE capstone class you meet with a Professor in EE or CE weekly to review your project and how the engineering work is going. They provide good feedback and suggestions on the design work being done.

-In BME you meet with the course leads (there are two) once or twice a semester. They simply do not have a good grasp on the technical challenges of your project. This design review results in mostly hand waving and discussion of human factors. The actual engineering designs are not refined by Professors. There are some TAs involved here, but generally other capstones have better technical advisers.

  1. Part ordering takes 4 weeks Engineering moves fast. You are stuck with the first iteration of your design since part ordering takes 4 weeks. The department does not prioritize getting your parts to you. Self-funding your parts or borrowing from friends is the best way to keep improving upon your engineering design. In my experience, buying my own parts or borrowing from friends was the only way to suceed on a reasonable timeline.
  2. Unmotivated peers Many students in the BME department have forsaken the art of engineering. They are getting a job in the business sphere, going on to med school, graduate school, or doing the MEM program. Or they already have a job offer and are enjoying their senior slide. Students only care about receiving an A in the class and do not value working on an engineering problem. Students have requested (to me) that they avoid doing engineering work for their capstone.

Many students optimize the engineering challenges out of the project. The 1k budget allows students to buy the instrumentation they need instead of building it.

  1. Projects are not impressive. Teams have spent an entire year of a Case BME capstone designing a soap dispenser that counts how many times it was used. Or a fridge that cools drugs. Or a box that dispenses medications. These are hackathon projects that have been expanded into a year long capstone since the bar for success is set low.
  2. Teams are chosen using an 'harmony' algorithm without accounting for student's interests or skills Students are assigned teams based on the CATME profile. Students can lose up to 30% of their grade if they are not well liked by their teammates. It's subjective.

Projects are chosen by another algorithm. Pertinent skills are disregarded. You pick your top 3 and pray. You don’t get to chose a project that aligns with your skills and interests.

  1. Proposing your own capstone is highly discouraged Professors told students that the last student proposed project scored low to encourage students to fall in line and use the algorithm above to be assigned a project.
  2. Course material is blatantly wrong. We had a lecture on the difference between standards and regulations. The lead professor said that standards, "are like guidelines and don't need to be followed." This is a poor message. The FCC standards are law. This lecture contained a picture of captain jack sparrow saying the above quote, but was quite ignorant on the value of FCC and IEEE standards to modern society.

I discussed my concerns with a track lead in the BME department, and he more or less said Design Work should be done by students on their own time. Students will only suceed as design engineers by doing work outside class, since it doesn’t really exist in our curriculum.

If you want a real capstone experience in BME I recommend avoiding this school. A poor capstone also means you will have difficulty getting a job with this degree.

If your already in, (and stuck with Case) I recommend taking a capstone from EECS or MECHE to supplement this.

2

Thank you for your thoughtful and clear explanation of the problems you’ve encountered. The fact that EECS and MECHE capstones are better run is the only encouraging part. That, and the fact that you have high standards for yourself which is commendable. Best of luck to you.

3

@marbles321 how does the capstone thing work? If I become a BME major am I still able to do the EECS or MECHE capstone projects like you said?

(Sorry if that’s a really basic question ahhh)

How is it like being a BME major overall? Course load-wise, professor/class-wise etc?

4

The best way to learn design engineering is through an industry position. Case does offer co ops and a placement office. I do not know any engineer who learns how to design equipment or circuits very well in school. A capstone project is a way to start to get some engineering skills, but don’t expect too much. Try to find good summer assignments or coops. Its the nature of BME that it attracts a lot of premedical students who are in no way suited to becoming engineers and really want to be doctors, PAs or nurses. So of course this is a big conflict as engineering skills and skills needed by a clinical doctor have little to no overlap. Also the department is way too crowded now due to the popularity of the major. The major is very specialized and most students should consider a more general degree like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, biochemistry or physics to get a very broad education. Biomedical engineering is something to study in graduate school, not the best choice for an undergraduate degree.

Study either mechanical, or electrical and see which is of interest. You can apply those degrees to medical devices, but some jobs do require clinical experiences too. So its a tough choice, and most jobs require a masters or PhD, as it can be a very science intensive subject.

Some of the problems you describe are exactly what engineers experience every day in their jobs such as how to manage conflict. In fact one job I held, was 100% conflict management between grown men who did not get along, so this conflict management aspect is important to master, and will always come up in ANY team project, at Case Western, in your first career job, and in the job you hold before you retire.

A biomedical engineer may work on DNA research OR designing a circuit for an electrosurgery device. Those two types of work have NO OVERLAP. Maybe one can see why biomedical engineering capstone projects might be very hard to manage, especially for a very crowded department. CS departments are struggling too for the same reason, too many students and not enough professors for the number of students.

5

The Capstone requirement at Case is part of the general education requirements of the university, though students usually complete them in the field of their major. But as long as a student has the pre-requisites for doing a Capstone in a related field or in a second major, they can usually choose to fulfill the Capstone requirement in the field that would be most interesting or useful.

6

Part 1/2
I would like to follow-up on the point about “I do not know any engineer who learns how to design equipment or circuits very well in school.”

Engineering, as a field is becoming more and more competitive. Entry-level job candidates are expected to have a combination of co-ops,internships, and/or design projects. Performing as a design engineer as an undergrad increases your chances for placement in industry jobs and co-ops. The co-op office has had trouble recently placing BME students in meaningful co-ops. I know a handful of BME students who did excel for the duration fo their co-op at Phillips Healthcare.One of my good friends just recently decided to go pre-med because his chance of getting a job with just courses from the bme device track is low.

At Case there are electrical engineering students who have an excellent grasp on analog design. These students took the following intensive analog design course. The course description is below. http://i.imgur.com/10tekNg.png. These students are much more competitive then the BME device students for these BME jobs. The EE capstone projects tend to make the BME capstone projects look bad as well.

[Also incoming case bmes on the device track, if you want a job out of an undergraduate degree I would recommend taking EECS 371 - “larry lab”. It’s not biomedical circuits but the concepts from analog design apply in many cases. This is not usually recommended to BME students.]

7

http://i.imgur.com/10tekNg.png Here’s that URL

8

http:/ /i.imgur.com /10tekNg.png

9

/// Part 2/2
The Case BME department used to have an equivalent course in biomedical circuit design .http://i.imgur.com/mfn2qYj.png The Case BME department has pulled this course and replaced it with a course that emphasizes modeling and technical essay writing. The replacement course has no design elements. This is the second graduate level modeling class I’ve had to take as an undergrad (ebme 309 && ebme 327). We talk about what types of pulses are used in bme devices, but never build the circuits that generate these pulses.

It is clear the BME department is grooming its students for graduate school, PhDs, and medical school. The biomed circuits lab in the curriculum (junior year) has no design projects and simple step by step labs. The students are given the designs they should build, and do not have to design and test their own circuits. More often then not, I find myself learning biomedical circuits and instrumentation from EECS courses without biomedical in their name.

To remain ABET accredited, the BME department (at last minute) throws a capstone at a student population that hasn’t done design work for 3 years. This causese the situation I’ve described in detail above.

If you really want to become a design engineer in biomedical devices, I would recommend looking into schools with equally high ranked bme and ee departments, and an evident focus on hands-on engineering. The BME department is only as strong as the CS, meche, polymer, and EE departments you also take classes with. You are paying around a quarter of a million dollars to go to engineering school, so if you want to become a design engineer, make sure you get your moneys worth.

Feel free to message me with further questions.
The links go to course descriptions only. put i. imgur in to access them.

10

“Students will only suceed as design engineers by doing work outside class, since it doesn’t really exist in our curriculum.”

Ugh. Do you mean that it is a shock to you that being an engineer is more dependent on your summer jobs, internships, and/or co-ops in college than a senior year project?

My college has vastly different experiences for vastly different majors. The only thing I can say is caveat emptor, and if you are a freshman or sophomore, go to every major student meeting you can and ask questions. It sounds like taking a Capstone in another major would have been more fulfilling and more appropriate, and still could have been approved as a Capstone for the BME degree.

I was BME and and I did my senior project with a Bio professor. I met perhaps twice with my adviser who would grade my project, and otherwise met weekly or biweekly with the Bio professor and/or members of her team.

I can say based on my experience as an engineer for many years before I started teaching it, there was NO point in time when my senior project or any other schoolwork directly impacted my job or that of anyone else I knew. I think the OP is expecting too much relevance to real world engineering from their Capstone.

Jobs before graduating college are key, not projects done as coursework.

11

@hechopecho You can do your capstone in another department if your declared in that major. I have not heard of any students declared as BME opting into the meche or eecs capstone but it may be possible.

The course load is quite heavy. My year 400 students entered the program as freshmen. There are 97 students enrolled in the second half of senior capstone, so we retained about 25%. This should speak to the course difficulty.

The courses are curved, meaning your success is based on the success or failure of the class. The courses are often taught by 3 or 4 professors, which increases the difficulty. The curriculum has become even more difficult in the recent years. The junior and senior bme courses here rival graduate level courses at other schools. My friend took a required biomaterials course here, and noticed she learned the same material a graduate student at texas a & m was learning in their grad level equivalent.

I wouldn’t mind the course difficulty if I knew I was developing my skills as a design based engineer. At some point it occurred to me I wasn’t get the hands-on engineering practice I needed. The rule of thumb is to take the course credits and multiple by 2 to 3. That should give you the hours you need to study to do well. 4 hours bme courses take 12 hours per week review. A good chunk of this is the matlab.

You will get very good at matlab, but using industry standard coding languages - C/C++/C# are left as an excercise to the student.

It’s honestly fine if you are going to medical school and graduate school. You will have a lot of modeling skills and I guess you can pick up skills as needed. It’s dicey to go into industry with this background.

12

@rhandco The students who do relevant side projects are more competitive for the co-ops and internships. The companies are more willing to take our EE students then our BME students.

There are very very few BME co-ops and internships out there. If you want to be competitive you need to have a concise clear narrative of an engineering project you completed. If you just have a bunch of theory based courses, employers aren’t as interested. Students who understand industry and have these projects will be given these opportunities

One of my friends who got a back to back BME co-op only was given that opportunity because he developed a therapeutic simulator circuit on his own time, (with the help of an EE student).

13

@marbles321 what is the course number of the analog design course you mention in #5? I couldn’t follow the link.

14

EECS 371

15

okay, got it. Thanks.

16

Back in the late 80’s as an EE student, I had heard someone who turned their summer job into a Capstone project (we called it Senior Project back in the day) and I thought that was a fantastic idea and did the same thing with my summer job at IBM. I contacted teh person in charge who gave me advice on what to add to what I was doing to make it meet the criteria for a senior project. I did so, and wrote it up and was done by October. For the second semester, my partner and I were supposed to evaluate a software product (this was a project that was proposed by the department/our advisor) and it was ordered and I am not sure if it ever arrived. :frowning:

17

I keep thinking about Capstone projects because I am working as an Engineer in Residence at Colorado State in Fort Collins and I see all the things the original writer, @marbles321, mentioned. Students are buying parts with their own money. Professors have no time to review the projects. Some projects are very basic. The IEEE has a program here where professional engineers are assigned to work with seniors in EE. You could call the Cleveland IEEE and ask if there are local design engineers who would want to help Case Western BME students with their design projects. I think a Capstone is not the be all and end all. Its just a few credits, so don’t over focus on it.

If a student has not had any summer engineering jobs so far, this is a cause for anxiety though. There should be a way to work at the many labs at Case Western before the senior year, but if students are not doing that, its a big problem.

If 75% of the students at CWRU are really dropping BME I expect there will be big changes coming for that program. It sounds like a program that is in flux. If a student is interested in design, there are course in CAD in mechanical engineering. They may not be required right now but maybe they should be required.

I think its fair for undergraduates to ask questions about the program and administrators and professors should have answers about whether BME is a terminal degree where a student can expect a job at the end of four years. It may not be. . It sounds as if it is not from these posts but clearly Johns Hopkins and Georgia Tech and many other universities are offering a bachelors in BME degree.

It would be fair to look at the requirements at Johns Hopkins and compare them to CWRU.

Civil engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering four year bachelors degrees may lead to a job at the end, if the student has had summer job experiences that are intense enough.

Most civil engineers have bachelors degrees and can work in consulting or for cities or counties and do fine. . Aerospace, electrical design engineers all have masters degrees
in the companies I see in Colorado. (Ball Aerospace, Hewlett packard, Seagate and others. )

Its a bit like neuroscience, a great degree for a pre med, but if you want to be a neuroscientist, you must get a PhD.
If you want to be a design engineer in today’s world, need a masters degree.

I know Georgia Tech has a one year masters in BME design for medical equipment.

There is a reason Georgia Tech offers this type of short masters degree! The bachelors in BME may not have time in the program to teach design. Its a very course intensive major to take biology, chemistry , mechanical and electrical engineering. I would call that a quadruple major.

18

My D is a senior ChemE at Case. The positive is that her capstone project is going extremely well. She is working with a local company, has had several meetings with them, and receiving positive feedback on their progress. Things did start slow for them to obtain materials, but going well now. Her fellow students are ones she worked with last year in two other project classes, so having good teammates plays a large role.

I want to add more to the discussion on coops etc. Part of the reason she chose Case was because of the coop program. What a bill of goods we were sold! The participation/placement numbers we were told before enrollement have not matched reality at all, unless you are a software person. Very few in her year got coops. By the time she realized this would not happen (and she went through two cycles) she didn’t have success getting an internship either.

Now in her senior year, the advice from the career office to look for positions is to “find alumni on linked in and connect with them.” She has a > 3.5 GPA but no work experience to this point.

Yes she could be more assertive in self promotion etc, but it is quite different from my experience at an engineering school in the 80s when the economy was supposedly worse.

19

@jackief - thanks for the info. What did your daughter end up doing in the summer? Was she able to find any kind of engineering type job?

20

nope. Basic minimum wage summer job stuff.