I want to major in BME for undergrad because it seems very interesting to me, but I have heard it a “jack of all trades” major, with no real focus. However, my school offers concentrations for their BME major, so I choose to be an ECE concentration, or like a CME concentration, or even a ME concentration. Is this better than doing a BS in ECE, or CHE then BME for my MS?
If you do a BME undergrad, you will need to do at least a masters for many employers to consider you, regardless of whether or not your school has concentrations within the BME major.
The majority of people who do BME as an undergrad do so because they are a pre health student. Their intention is to go to some health professions school (i.e., medical, dental, pharmacy) rather than work as an engineer.
If you intend to work as an engineer, you can always do a more traditional discipline (e.g., ME, EE, ChemE) and then take some BME courses as your technical/engineering electives.
Most schools have concentrations for their BME programs - the field is so broad that it makes more sense for you to specialize on one aspect than attempt to cover the entire spread.
If you want too work as an engineer out of undergrad, even with a concentration I would say that you’d be best served by pursuing a more traditional undergraduate engineering major. My reasoning is that even with the concentration in (for example) CompBio, you will have noticeably less skills than a student with a BS in the more traditional discipline (in this case Computer Science).
If you plan on going to grad school, an undergrad degree in BME is more doable, but I’d still say that going for a more traditional undergrad is better.
Thanks a lot, I am also considering ECE since my school, University of Rochester, put electrical and computer engineering into one major. Do you think ECE is a good traditional eng major, if I plan to stick with BME for grad?
@uroc145 Doing ECE undergrad and BME graduate would work. Make sure you’re using your electives in ways that will prepare you for a biomedical graduate study. You could also do ME or ChE for undergraduate as well, depending on what your BME focus might be.
Alternatively, you could start in BME, figure out which focus you like, and then switch majors to the relevant traditional engineering major. For example, if you decided that you liked Biosignals and Biosystems, you could then switch to the ECE major for reasons already discussed.
You may also be able to start undeclared and take a variety of classes relating to different engineering majors before declaring a major.
Don’t stress out. There are many routes to the same destination. Best of luck
The way I see it the “best” pairings would be:
Cell and Tissue Engineering -> ChemE, ChemBE, Chemistry, Biology
Computational Biology and Computational Medicine-> Applied Math, CS, ECE (maybe)
Imaging -> CS, ECE, EE, Applied Physics
Instrumentation and Robotics -> CS, ECE, MechE
Microfluidics -> ECE, EE, MechE
Pharma and Drug Design -> ChemE, ChemBE, Chemistry
Systems Biology
Biomechanics -> MechE
Biosignals -> ECE, EE
Neuro Engineering -> ECE, EE, Biology, Neuroscience
There are even more specializations and sub specializations, so this is more of a general overview.
So it really depends on which specialization of BME you’re interested in, but ECE is a good general choice.