Admitted to CWRU this fall. Can anyone provide me some definitive, objective comments of CWRU biomedical engineering? For example workload/research/and what are the pros and cons between it’s BME department and other prestigious colleges (JHU, Berkeley…).
Also, as for my own career, the plan is to go from BME to medical school and probably focus on the diagnostic radiology/imaging track.
Have you committed to Case yet? What schools are you deciding between right now? Were you admitted to JHU and Berkeley?
If you’ve committed to Case, you can rest assured that it is an excellent school, well-known for its strength in biomedical engineering, and that tons of graduates from that program go on to med school.
CWRU is my only choice rn, but I still got waitlists from Berkeley BE, Rice BE, CMU CS and Northwestern BME.
You should deposit at Case today, confident in the fact that it’s a fantastic school with excellent engineering and premed opportunities.
If you get off a waitlist, you can cross that bridge when you come to it, I suppose. If it were me, I’d commit fully to Case and I wouldn’t look back.
Are you unhappy with Case at all? Do you prefer one those other schools?
Case is undoubtedly great. But, when I check for its undergrad BME curriculum, I found it has much less diversified courses than other institutions I mentioned. Also, according to the website, only a few graduates make it into the top 10 medical schools, although 67% are able to go on to medical schools.
I’m an international student and there are significant costs associated with coming to the US for studying, so I need to consider the cost effectiveness. At the same time, I also admitted to Bioinformatics at Hong Kong University, and my interest in both paths (HKU for academia, Case for medicine) is similar. Therefore, I am not sure if I have to come to the US to study if there is only a very small probability of getting into top medical schools after graduating from Case. I know medical schools are all extremely competitive, but I still think graduates from different colleges will have different relative opportunities.
67% is a fantastic outcome – I didn’t know about that. Can you afford the cost to go to Case?
In the US, medical schools do not care where you do your undergrad studies. Why do you feel you need to get into a “top medical school”? Medical school is VERY expensive in the US, no matter which school you attend.
Do you want to be a physician or do you want to work in academics? How much would your education in Hong Kong cost? The US physician path will be incredibly expensive.
I don’t know about international student admissions to US med schools, maybe @WayOutWestMom does…
I wonder if one of the issues with BME grads not getting into top medical schools is that BME is a hard path to medical school. It’s my understanding that medical schools are often looking for high GPA’s and that is harder to accomplish as an engineering major than some other paths that you could take to get to medical school. My D is a BE major at Rice and at orientation they mentioned they don’t encourage pre-meds to major in engineering. A lot do (about 1/3 of each BE class), but it’s not an easy route to take. My daughter had classes early on in her program where the average midterm scores were awful. And there are also a lot more credits required to graduate. I think my daughter needs 134 credits and a biology major for example needs 120.
If your ultimate goal is to attend medical school in the US, please rethink your plan. Very, very few international students are admitted to US med schools. Last year fewer than 200 international students in total were admitted to ALL US med schools combined. About 85% of those 200 are Canadian citizens.
There are 2 issues internationals face w/r/t med school: 1) only 44 US med schools say they consider internationals for admission. Of those 44, most admit 0-2 students/ year. 2) There is no financial aid for international students. Internationals are required to prove they can self fund all 4 years of medical school—including living expenses— before they are allowed to enroll. This usually requires placing $250K or more in a US escrow account.
Additionally, international students are ineligible for MSTP funding for MD/PhDs.
RE: Case’s 67% acceptance rate to med school… that’s only true after substantial weeding in undergrad coursework and getting approval of the Health Professions committee whose job it is to prevent students who are unlikely to gain a med school acceptance from applying in the first place by withholding the committee letter of recommendation required to apply to medical school
Thanks! I know, so that’s where I’m struggling. Now there are three paths ahead of me
1: Go to HK for Bioinformatics and then come to the US for a phd in BME to join academia.
2: Go to Case for BME and attend a top medical school and become a physician.
3: Go to Case for BME, apply for phd, and join academia.
For the first one, although it is the least expensive and relatively easy, but the US is far ahead in the world in medical related fields, so being in HK is not advantageous for me to develop academically.
For the second, it would be most in line with my interests, but it is the route with the smallest probability of success and the most difficult (although tuition is not an issue).
For the third one, the cost is higher than the first one, but the phd application result may not be better, and it also means being far away from home for four years.
One of the reasons is that I don’t want to spend a great cost and time to come all the way to the U.S. and end up in a relatively average medical school, it’s not worth it. I would probably be more stable in academia, as my parents work in related fields, so I don’t know if it’s necessary to try the more challenging and risky path of medical school if I can’t get into a top medical school.
Thanks! Is there any advantages of taking BE for applying a medical school?
I honestly don’t know. That would be a great thread to start to see what people here know on that topic. I think BME is a great major, and it certainly will prepare you for med school, but it won’t be the easiest to maintain a high GPA. It IS done though. Like I said, my daughter is a BME major (with no interest in med school) and while her school doesn’t recommend it as the path to take if you are certain about med school, about 1/3 of the BME students are pre-med at her school (another 1/3 go on to get a PhD, and the final 1/3 go on to work in the medical device or pharma industries). One positive regarding BME is that is is an employable degree should be decide not to go to med school.
Here is one article I found about this topic, but I’m sure there are many others:
Absolutely none.
Med school admissions officers do not consider an applicant’s undergrad major when making admission decisions.
Med students don’t even need to be science majors so long as they have completed all the science & math pre-requisite classes. (My daughters’ med school classmates had a wide of variety of undergrad majors: forestry, English lit, Italian, music composition, theology, sociology, gender studies, sports communications, business, BME, software engineering, mathematics, physics, public health to name just a few.)
The biggest advantage of BME is that it provides a ready-made back-up career should an applicant not gain a med school admission.
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I think your option #2 has a vanishingly small chance for success.
Top medical schools (however you choose to define that) accept only a tiny number of international students.
Residency training in the US also present issues for internationals since most residencies do not sponsor visas and automatically filter out international applicants. The higher ranked the residency program and the more competitive the specialty, the less likely it is to offer visas for residents. Those programs that do offer visas, typically only offer J1 visas which require the holder to leave the US at the end of their training. Although a J1 can be converted to a H1B visa in some cases, that generally requires the visa holder to work for 5 years as a physician in a federally designated medically underserved region of the US. (Poor urban hospitals or rural areas.)
FWIW, radiology 9diagnostic and interventional) is a considered a competitive specialty. Zero international applicants matched into any radiology residencies in the most recent Match.
I also don’t see any mention of your desire to work in a patient-facing role. Academic medicine is still medicine. The vast bulk of your time is spent seeing patients. Next is teaching/supervising residents and administration. Release time for research is not guaranteed.
you know what they call the person who graduates from an easier to get into medical school?
Doctor
Thanks for replying! How about if I’m a permanent resident (EB-5 green card)? I’ll probably get this within the nearest two years.
By the way, my interests in patient-facing role and research are similar, all depends on which path I choose. Also, do you have any suggestions for comparing option #1 and option #3? Does doing a BME undergrad at Case give a significant advantage to applying for a PHD versus an international graduate?
Green card holders (US permanent residents) are treated the same as citizens w/r/t med school admission and residency.
However, if your visa is tied to owning/running a business, be aware that many?/most? med schools prohibit med students from working while attending medical school–no matter how minimal the hours are. It’s part of the enrollment contract you sign when you start school. Working in violation of that contract is grounds for automatic dismissal from med school.
RE: your second post-- No idea. Sorry. Outside my area of expertise.
I will add another…go to Case and attend any medical school here you might be accepted to. You don’t need to attend a top medical school to be a doctor. No matter what medical school you graduate from…you will be a doctor. Frankly, as an international student, you are being pretty picky since so few international students actually even get accepted to medical schools here.
Have you considered going to medical school in your home country?
Getting into a fully-funded PhD program for biomedical sciences or engineering in the US is not difficult, even for international students.
Profs need PhD students and postdocs to perform their experiments or the work doesn’t get done. There are problems with the overproduction of biomedical PhDs, because there are not enough permanent positions to employ them later.
There is a movement within biomedical science to move toward a different model. This model would have fewer PhD students and postdocs doing the daily laboratory work, and would shift toward creating more permanent staff positions for people with PhDs to have stable careers doing work in academic labs.
I fully support this movement, but it is far from the norm right now, and it will take a long time to implement if it even happens. I seriously doubt that there will be any difficulties for the foreseeable future for students applying to biomedical PhD programs in the US. The positions are plentiful, well-funded, and not hard to get.
I can see some advantage to doing your undergrad in the US if you want to do PhD in the US, but I don’t think it’s worth the cost difference if Hong Kong undergrad is cheap. There are TONS of international PhD students here and they don’t have trouble getting into programs.
As for employment after the PhD, I know nothing about academia in Hong Kong. I do not advise you to plan for an academic career as a biomedical PhD in the US. It is brutal and to be totally frank, you’re not likely to find a faculty position. That would be if you do your PhD in something other than engineering, such as: bioinformatics, molecular biology, neuroscience, physiology, biochemistry, etc.
You would be more likely to find a faculty position as a BME professor (as opposed to other biomedicine) in the US, because schools have trouble recruiting engineering professors here. But academics is a rough road and you absolutely need a backup plan. An undergraduate engineering and/or CS degree is a great backup plan, since you can have a stable career right out of college.
No. As I said before, US is far ahead in the world in medical related fields, so that’s why I’m interested in Case’s premed track. Otherwise, I’ll maintain my plan to BME-related academia.