<p>For the past several months, I've been looking at colleges with the intent of going for an Electrical and Computer Engineering major. I thought it would be the best fit for me. I love to work with things, I love computers, and things like computer science and circuits in physics were among my best subjects/classes in HS. It felt like EE/CE was the right path to take. </p>
<p>Lately, my dad and I have been talking about my future plans. In his eyes, the best path for me would be pre-medicine/medical school or at least biomedical or biochemical engineering. And it's not just the typical Asian-parent-wants-kid-to-be-doctor thing. He's talked with many friends and respected professionals in the medical related fields about different things that would help him see if that same path is a good one for me to take. He sees me as a person born to be in the medical field, seeing me do well studying and memorizing things. At first I felt that he was ashamed of me for wanting to go to EE/CE, and wanted to redirect me, but lately I've more and more begun to rethink my desire to go for EE/CE. Now, I'm lost between the two.</p>
<p>So my question is, how does one decide which to take? What are the "signs" that you should go to EE/CE or Medicine/Biomedical/Biochemical? What are the respective fields like? Things like job recruitment/demand, salary, years of study, difficulty, etc. Right now I can't think of any more questions, but perhaps as more responses are posted I can ask some more. </p>
<p>Thanks in advanced.</p>
<p>You can switch to bioengineering at quite a late stage. Electrical Engineering is a very active and important part of medical research.</p>
<p>I’ll just tell you this: no one is good at memorizing more than others. Apparent differences are accounted for by work ethic not innate ability. Doctors are not intelligent people, they are hard working people that knew how to game the medical cartel system in the US (and present nowhere else in the world). They can memorize but barely know math beyond high school algebra. Eventually doctors will be replaced by computers. If you want to make money, why even consider medicine, you’ll be 300K in debt. Instead become a quant on wall street.</p>
<p>Medical skills are not transferable between countries the way engineering skills are. You’ll be paying money to study medicine while you will be paid to study engineering at the graduate level. MDs can only become doctors after they graduate medical school, because the crushing debt forces them to, but engineers can do anything because they’re financially free. Many engineering PhDs work on wall street as quants making millions per year. </p>
<p>Trust me, if you’re good at math and physics. studying biology would be like CHEWING GLASS. Been there, done that, chewing glass felt better than sitting down with a biology book and memorizing pointless tiny details for hours.</p>
<p>^Wow, what a bunch of baloney!</p>
<p>What did I say that wasn’t true?</p>
<p>There are indeed engineers on wall street working as quants making millions. There are no MDs on wall street making millions.</p>
<p>MDs are indeed in crushing debt. Engineers are paid for PhD studies. Doctors can only be doctors because they have no transferable skills, all they can do is memorize which is fact, because medical school is about memorizing 2000 page books filled with tiny useless details instead of calculations. Engineers can do anything they want ranging from finance to sales to actual engineering and research.</p>
<p>Engineers can go anywhere in the world and still be engineers. Maybe not civil, but definitely chemical and electrical. Doctors have licensing issues that make moving tough.</p>
<p>Doctors don’t need to know math, that’s obvious, do you know a doctor that uses differential equations?</p>
<p>You can major in EE and still fulfill the course requirements for medical school. It will require you to take a few extra courses but it is most definitely doable.</p>
<p>As for signs, I don’t think there really are any concrete ones. You just have to know what you like and want to do. If you want to design things it’s better to be an engineer. If you want to more directly see the impact of helping people it’s better to be an engineer. </p>
<p>Medicine is going to require substantially more formal than engineering. Doctor salaries are higher than engineering salaries in most cases, but engineers also don’t have to deal with things like insurance. Both fields will always be in demand. People will always be dieing and new things will always have to be designed, maintained, analyzed, etc. I would say they are of similar difficulty, but offer different challenges that cannot be easily compared.</p>
<p>As for the other guy, doctors won’t be replaced by computers any time soon. Rest assured that your corpse will be in an advanced state of decay before this even starts to happen in a meaningful way.</p>
<p>If you’re good at math and physics you may or may not like biology. Your anecdotal evidence is not representative of everyone. I had some interest in biology and did well in math and physics.</p>
<p>Also, some people are better at memorization than others. And very few PhDs are working on Wall Street making millions.</p>
<p>Why not? A computer can easily prompt patients for symptoms, search a database, use a probability algorithm to match with disease type, then send a prescription to the pharmacy.</p>
<p>Anyhow, even if zero doctors existed, as long as infrastructure was good, the average lifespan would not decrease significantly. The greatest advances in health were due to water treatment and sewers. The greatest reducers of average lifespan is infectious disease. There is a direct correlation between reduction of infectious disease rates and average lifespans. I can’t post links directly, but you can just search google “infectious disease lifespan” for some information. Current medicine is focused on things that are high input, low output, do not increase average lifespans and are ridiculously expensive. The greatest advances in non infrastructure based lifespan increase were due to chemists discovering new drugs, not due to biologists doing anything.</p>
<p>Evidence of biology being useless is everywhere. You can run a simple search on careerbuilder and enter biology, note the number of total jobs, note the number of graduate degree requiring jobs. Then search electrical engineering, note the number of total jobs, note the number of graduate degree requiring jobs.</p>
<p>Also note that doctors pay for medical school which is fact, and science/engineering PhDs (if you choose to get a PhD in any scientific field) do not.</p>
<p>If only it were that easy. People aren’t always very good at describing the symptoms they have. Doctors can attempt to pry the necessary information out of patients much better than some random touch screen LCD. Also, not everything can be diagnosed via algorithm. A blood test or some other kind of test might be necessary. Results of such a test might not always be straightforward and may require some interpretation by an experienced doctor. And let’s not even get into how people would exploit diagnosis-by-computer and sell prescription drugs.</p>
<p>What do you plan on doing when you need surgery? Hope that your fabled computer program will know what to do? </p>
<p>Do you even know what biology is? That was a rhetorical question, by the way, as it’s obvious you don’t.</p>
<p>You’re right, you do have to pay for medical school and engineers do get to go to graduate school at no cost or while being paid. However, this debt from school is not going to condemn a doctor to the life of a beggar, as you are seemingly implying. Doctors that I see are often doing quite well… especially ones that are highly specialized.</p>
<p>I don’t? Until 3 months ago, the B.S. in Biology on my transcript said otherwise. When I finally woke up after I got a job, I realized how useless Biology was even in the context of what supposedly was its “best application area” - pharmaceuticals. I’m not the best at biology, far from it, but I’ve studied it for 3 years, and realized it was a useless degree except for a few things. So I switched to a more applicable and marketable major. It’s you that has not taken upper division biology classes, so I believe that the people who have, are slightly more qualified to speak about them.</p>
<p>Look, let’s get on topic. I’ve made my point: biology is worthless, medicine is a cartel, getting in is a gamble. Go with electrical engineering. But it’s your choice, and whatever you do, just don’t make a choice you will regret. Want to help people? 1 civil engineer can save more lives than 50 doctors. Want money? Finance - which comes easy to engineers.</p>
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<p>I would reccomend against doing this if you want to be a doctor practicing medicine.</p>
<p>1) In an engineering program, you’ll spend a lot of time learning a lot of technical details which are irrelevant to a practicing doctor. Even the toolset of analytical techniques that you learn in an engineering program won’t be that useful. Doctors don’t have to be super analytical–there are other more important skills that doctors need to have. This is why medical schools don’t favor the more analytical majors (math, CS, physics, engineering) when deciding admissions.</p>
<p>2) It will be harder to maintain a good GPA in an engineering program than if you were to study biology or chemistry or something else. You’ll have less time to do the extra-curricular activities that premedical students need to do to be able to get into medical school.</p>
<p>However, if you want to be a researcher in the medical field, engineering or physics could be a good choice (a better choice than biology/biochemistry) if you want to work on problems in which you can apply a very precise, mathematical theory. It is a lot easier to pick up the relevant biology facts as you need them then it is to learn all of the mathematics and physics required for those problems.</p>
<p>If you want to work on medical imaging or instrumentation technologies, electrical engineering would be a very good choice.</p>