<p>The bottom line is that medical schools are looking for very intelligent, hard-working students who have a genuine interest in medicine. They must have completed certain undergrad requirements in the sciences (math, chem, bio) but beyond that, they can be engineers, musicians, history majors whatever. Oh yeah, MCAT scores are important too.</p>
<p>This has been discussed before on CC many times.</p>
<p>One of the largest biomed programs is at Boston University. Major funding. </p>
<p>You can check the size of a program by going through the profiles at asee.org. That’s the American Society for Engineering Education. If you go to the Publications tab, select ASEE Publications and look to the left you’ll see college profiles. Open that and you’ll see online profiles in the list. If you search, you can check funding by area, meaning external research funding, which is a good proxy. You can also check how many kids are in each area and the faculty devoted to it, etc. </p>
<p>So for example, if you type in Boston University and look down the list on the left, you’ll see Research Expenditures under Graduate. BU gets over $29M in biomed funding, which makes it one of the largest programs, both in total dollars and per student. By per student, I’m just dividing by school size, not looking at the department size. That would take actual work! Note that Michigan, which is one of the biggest engineering schools - with $188M total - has the same biomed funding as BU. USC, which is also a big engineering school - with $169M - has half that much in biomed funding.</p>
<p>Rochester gets $6M+, which makes it a mid-sized program. Washington University gets $11M+, so that program scales in size of funding with the size of the school compared to Rochester. See? Case Western gets $12M+ so it’s program is larger per student. Purdue, which gets over $200M in funding for engineering, has as much as WashU. But look at Purdue’s civil engineering funding ($37M). Or its electrical engineering ($63M). Every program is different. </p>
<p>You can go through the profiles and see which schools have more invested in civil engineering versus bioinformatics. You can see the huge divide between the largest schools and the smallest. You can see which schools have which kinds of research centers. The information on how many are enrolled in each area is really important. Want to work in something related to optics and lasers? Go to Rochester. The research money is off the charts. </p>
<p>BTW, I listed directions for getting to the profiles instead of a link because links can break but the directions should get you to the general place.</p>