Chemical Engineering vs. Bioengineering vs. Computer Science

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>So I know that ChemE vs. BioE has been discussed to death, but I had a question that I couldn't glean from the others threads.</p>

<p>I am planning on going to grad school and doing research in molecular biology and the life sciences. I do not, at the moment, plan on going into industry, and if I do, I would like to go into pharmaceuticals or something related to medicine or sciences.</p>

<p>I was first draw to BioE because I think that cell and tissue, and well as drug discovery and drug delivery, are fascinating and allow for both basic research (wetlab) as well as design (the engineering portion). However, some professors doing AMAZING work in these fields, such as Paula Hammond at MIT, are part of their respective ChemE departments and majored in ChemE themselves. So even though I am definitely planning on going to grad school, would ChemE be the better choice?</p>

<p>In my search for a biological major that includes both wetlab/basic science research, and technology/engineering, I also found multiple majors such as UCSD's CompSci with Bionformatics and MIT's Course 6-7, just to name a few. These sound really interesting because I personally think that a lot of the biological research we are doing right now is analyzed in a slight archaic fashion (at least the lab I work in....). I am also interested in neuroscience so I feel that CompSci and Neuroscience naturally go together. </p>

<p>I was just wondering which would be the best for me, considering that I would like to go to grad school (hopefully become a professor eventually and become a PI) and that I would like to do both wet lab, basic science research, as well as maintaing some engineering aspects. I would also love to be able to get a well paying job if grad school doesn't work out or if I decide to enter industry for a few years before I go to grad school.</p>

2

<p>I’m just finishing a PhD in Chemical Engineering, and a lot of people in our department do molecular biology, metabolic engineering, tissue engineering, and the like. They probably have joint appointments in BME, but are primarily ChE. I would say that BME still suffers some from a reputation of technical shallowness or lack of identity as a discipline, so ChE is probably a more robust choice. Especially since you seem like you want to keep options open for an industrial career.</p>

<p>You didn’t really ask any questions about CS/neuroscience, so I’m not sure what to tell you there.</p>

3

<p>I guess it just depends whether I want to do ChemE type bio work, which seems to involve more wetlab which I like, versus bioinformatics and computational biology. </p>

<p>However bioinformatics and computational biology seems to involve using biologists’ data and writing algorithms and programs to explain the data and make it useful. Do computational biologists do any wetlab work?</p>

4

<p>Not much… I’m nudging DD2 towards comp bio or comp neuro and no wetwork seems to be a big selling point (experiments take hours or days instead of months, etc).</p>

<p>The (few) undergrad comp bio programs seem to suggest labs full of biologists, md’s, comp bio’s, and similar all happily working together for the cause. I don’t know how realistic this is in real life. May be worth finding out.</p>

5

<p>The computationalists I know don’t do wet lab work. They may collaborate with research groups that do, but they don’t do it themselves.</p>