Hi all,
I’m really passionate for both biology (specifically neurology) AND engineering. I build stuff at home all the time and love to work with my hands but I’m pretty stumped trying to choose my major. I always thought I’d major in biomedical engineering for that but the more I look into it, the more it seems like a bad idea; it seems like I’ll be working on MRI machines and I won’t come out with a whole lot of engineering knowledge with not a whole lot of career options.
I’m totally up for double majoring, and in fact, I want to. I’m tech savy, I run linux on my home computer, I know some JS and Python, I love Arduino, I built a desktop computer, etc. so I’ve considered computer engineering or science, but I don’t want to spend all my time learning about computers either. on the electrical engineering side, I’ve built my own drone and like I said I work with Arduino a lot and have always loved electronics in general so at this point I’m kind of thinking doubling in electrical in biomedical engineering, but I’m really not sure because I have no idea what it takes to become a neural engineer.
My question: What should I major in (assume my school has no concentrations of biomed or electrical engineering) in order to become a neural engineer? After that what should I do post grad and other than MIT or John Hopkins, what are some good midrange schools offering neural engineering post grad?
Thanks!
Just because you major in something doesn’t mean that you spend all your time learning about it. An average college requires around 120 credits to graduate, which - assuming each class is roughly 3 credits each - is about 40 classes. But your average college major only requires around 36-48 credits to complete, which is roughly 12-16 classes. So less than half your classes (and sometimes, as few as a third) will be in your major.
Another third will probably be taken up by divisional and general education requirements, but most colleges allow you some flexibility in that (so for your science requirement you can choose whether you want to take geology or chemistry, for example). And the final third will mostly be electives that you pick yourself based on interests and career goals.
Neural engineers are simply biomedical engineers who specialize in a specific part of the body - much like neurologists are simply MDs who have done a specialized residency and training. Neural engineering seems to draw primarily from electrical and computer engineering and borrows also from materials science, neuroscience, biology, and computer science of course.
So you can major in a lot of things to get into this. Some kind of engineering major would be best - biomedical engineering sounds like a good fit, and so does electrical. If your school has neither, then perhaps mechanical engineering with some heavy biology/neuroscience or computer science coursework. Materials science combined with these other areas could also work. Even if you went somewhere with no engineering, you could still probably major in computer science and take heavy coursework in physics, math, and biology/chemistry - it really kind of depends on whether it’s important for you to actually do engineering work or whether you just want to be involved in researching and developing systems/processes/materials for the neural system.
As for graduate programs, I think you would simply get a master’s in biomedical engineering. You could go to a university that has a specialization or a center or something in neural engineering or strengths in the neurosciences. Case Western, for example, has a [url=<a href=“http://www.case.edu/cse/nec/%5Dcenter%5B/url”>http://www.case.edu/cse/nec/]center[/url] for neural engineering. But I think you should also realize that this is a brand-new area and not a very commonly used term, so you’ll probably find this work going on under a lot of aliases: computational neuroscience, nanotechnology, neural materials science, even just plain old neuroscience. A lot of people who do neural engineering work/research might just call themselves materials scientists or neuroscientists or biomedical engineers.