<p>Thanks for the link</p>
<p>thank you tanman and pdoshi88.</p>
<p>i would also like to ask about the scope of this field. what are the prospects of this field in the coming say 5 to 10 years? is there a demand for biomedical engineers? also, are there any numbers out here regarding salaries of BME people (undergrad or grad)? the reason for my inquiries is that i have been doing some research and found that the demand for engineers is not that great and that BME people, or any engineers for that matter, are having a tough time finding jobs, so they head on over to med school and get a degree from there (i am also considering pharmacy, for that field will stay relatively consistent in demand). My final question is that what is/are the best focus areas of BME i.e instrumentation, research, marketing, etc.? (i would like to do instrumentation, but i think the money is at marketing)</p>
<p>thanks.</p>
<p>Sorry for being MIA for a while. I've been quite busy lately, but I'm incredibly excited about making the most of my senior year!</p>
<p>faris786, you asked about the scope of this field. One reason I chose BME was because you draw from so many other engineering techniques -- BME is very interdisciplinary. If you know about aerospace engineering, that is what I would compare BME to, but I still think BME is much more diverse.</p>
<p>In fact, this is one of the complaints people have about BME. It is so broad that it is hard to define what is BME and what is not (almost everything can be BME, or has techniques that are adapted by BME). Also, you don't have the focus of (for example) an electrical engineer, where'd you'd have significant dept in a single traditional engineering area.</p>
<p>I am not sure where you get the idea that demand for engineers is weak. Anecdotally speaking, most engineers at Hopkins don't seem to have a problem getting a job if that is what they want. The majority of engineering students go directly to medical school, law school, or graduate school because they <em>want</em> to. In fact, it'd be kind of hard to get apply to medical school after finding out you got rejected from all your jobs, because of the length of time it takes to take MCATs, apply, and interview.</p>
<p>Hopkins does not have a focus area called marketing for BME. If you want to know where the money is at, it is in finance, intellectual property and business. In fact, a significant portion of BME graduates don't go into a typical engineering job. Every year, graduates end up at i-banks, law school, consulting, etc. One particularly lucrative job is being a patent lawyer for biomedical technologies. You should look up the starting and average salaries ;-D One of my friends is currently a venture capitalist at Siemens, he graduated Hopkins BME in 2005. I think that is a fantastic job, and just one example of the diverse jobs BME students from Hopkins end up at.</p>
<p>I believe BME is still very new, and the field as a whole is unlikely to experience a decline for decades to come. There is so little we know about the human body. I could go on forever about the top brain research going on around the world, and how no one has any idea what they're observing, or not really seeing at all.</p>
<p>I personally am interested in computational biology, right now mostly doing data mining. There's so much to do with the massive amounts of data we are collecting these days, and the same techniques used in BME are easily applied at the DoD, hedge funds, google, etc. It is supposedly a pretty hot field right now in terms of hiring, you may want to look into that.</p>