I am having trouble deciding to attend BU or JHU next year. I was fortunate enough to be accepted this year into the BME program. Obviously Johns Hopkins is the best program in the world for the major. However, I received the Presidential Scholarship at BU and I want to get opinions on whether spending the extra 20k a year on Hopkins is justified.
What are the outcomes of BME students in both colleges? I know I’ve had a bit of trouble when trying to find detailed information from Hopkins.
If anyone could comment and share their ideas, it would be very helpful.
Thanks in advance.
For the record, I’m a JHU Neuroscience graduate - not a BME. First off, if money is of key importance to you and your family then that should be the primary deciding factor. BU is a fine school and if you work hard and seize opportunities then you’ll achieve your career goals without a problem.
Look over this thread, which gives a general breakdown of the benefits for a larger school (BU at around 16,000) vs a smaller school (JHU is 6,500): http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/johns-hopkins-university/1881007-jhu-vs-umich-instate-for-bme.html#latest. BU is not known as a large research institution, and the importance of research opportunities is critical for a BME (or any science major). This of course doesn’t mean that there is no research at BU, but that you may need to compete and work harder to get quality research opportunities and research mentorship as a BU undergrad - at Hopkins this is not a problem - in fact, it is probably the university’s greatest strength. Maybe BU students mooch off of MIT and Harvard for research as well, I’m not sure of the dynamics, but there definitely is a lot of research going on in Boston as a whole.
BME is a profession that basically requires a grad education. Again, if money is an important factor then make sure you tack on a graduate degree to your education costs.
The need for a graduate degree is also why outcomes are probably not published. Hopkins also has a fair amount of students who are BMEs but premed in disguise (I saw on the website it says about 1% of BMEs are premed who go on to medical school, but I have a hard time believing that number is so low just based on my personal encounters. Producing students who just go for more schooling make it hard to keep track of outcomes and numbers on average salary during the next decade (or whatever metric people like to look at) would be misleading. Basically, Hopkins engineering as a whole is focused on the premier BME experience, which was largely born out of the Hopkins healthcare empire and its unparalleled research expenditures (see above link). You will have more experiences, support, etc. at JHU than most other schools, but that does not mean you can’t succeed and accomplish whatever you want while saving money up for grad school. Your success at BU will require more effort on your part seizing opportunities and more actively seeking out career and academic counseling (I suppose, I’m not familiar with BU counseling services just that the student body is 2.5 times larger). Additionally, JHU BME will also be hard work (people do drop from the program because it is rigorous - not impossible - but you do have to study a lot. This comes with the territory, nothing worth having is easy).
Hope this helps. There is no right answer. You know yourself better than anyone, so do a little marginal utility analysis for the additional cost and decide if it is worth it. @saif235 is a current BME at JHU and can speak with more authority on this.
I can’t speak to BU, but I did go through a similar (though not as extreme cost benefit analysis) when I was deciding between Hopkins BME and my state school. So I guess I can at least give you some information on the Hopkins BME program and it’s outcomes.
From what I could tell when I was researching BME programs, Hopkins BME is unique for two main reaseons
Hopkins BME actually teaches BME. That sounds kinda ridiculous, but it’s actually true. Most BioE and BME programs that I’ve seen treat BME as an extension of other engineering disciplines, so a BioE or BME major will take a bunch of EE, MechE, and CS courses with some Bio sprinkled on top and come away with a degree in BIoenginering. Hopkins teaches BME as a program focused on using engineering principles to solve biological problems. Of course we do have to take standard engineering courses (like Signals and Systems, Programming, general science and math), but we also take three Systems Bioengineering courses and, because of the research and professors at Hopkins, we have the opportunity to learn about some really cool stuff. For example if you’re interested in Robotics you can take classes like Computer Vision, Algorithms for Sensor Based Robotics, Mechatronics, and Robot Sensors and Actuators. If cell and tissue engineering is more of your thing you can take classes like Biomaterials, Build-a-Genome, Bioelectricity, and Cellular / Tissue Engineering. All of these classes aren’t necessarily unique to Hopkins, but you’d have the opportunity to learn about a lot of cool stuff here.
Hopkins BME (and Hopkins Engineering in general) is a "design based" engineering program. That means that you'll have opportunities to actually design and build biomedical devices and solutions as part of your undergraduate coursework. There is literally a class, which many BMEs take as part of their "design" credit requirement, where the class is broken up into teams who spend the year working on a problem presented to them by a clinician - it's actually almost like shark tank. A whole bunch of clinicians at Hopkins Med School literally present problems they'd like to be solved to a room full of undergraduates and are literally trying to convince you (and your team)) to pick their project. And these design teams are actually pretty successful. They're generally able to build prototypes win business plan competitions, and some teams are able to license their devices to larger medical companies or build startups around their product.
Outcomes of BME are definitely on the Hopkisn website though they are pretty vague. You should know that in general it’s hard to get a job in the industry with an undergraduate degree in BME (from any school) just because of the amount of specialization require d to do actual BME work. Most jobs that a BME undergrad can do could (potentially) be filled by someone with another engineering degree or a pure Bio or Chem degree (depending on the job). So if you want a job you will probably want to go to grad school. As for outcomes, about 1/3 of Hopkins BMEs go to med school, 1/3 go to grad school, and 1/3 go into industry. Specifically I personally know BMEs who have graduated and gone to work for companies like Epic, Accenture, and Booze Allen, others who have gotten into UCSF and Hopkins Med, and still others who have gotten into grad schools like Hopkins and Oxford (yes it’s still hard to get into grad programs at Hopkins if you’re a Hopkins undergrad unless you go for a 5 year masters program).