<p>I recently changed my plans for after grad. I am currently finishing up my sophomore year at Case Western as a BME major. </p>
<p>I was originally considering med school as my main option but after reading some more, I have been leaning more and more towards getting my masters in BME and then moving on to getting my MBA. </p>
<p>I have been researching mostly things about BME, I have a pretty good GPA and am working at a research lab, but what else should I be doing? </p>
<p>I am starting a PhD in BME this fall, but I have also changed my plan to doing a MS(Im planning on a MeM also which takes about a year), working for at least two years (this is important), and then taking a shot a business school. I think its a great plan, especially since BME is the fastest growing eng industry.</p>
<p>In terms of advice, Id say make sure you get a solid EE background (in terms of electives). Also, meet with your professor(s) face to face a lot, Its harder than it sounds. You want to take on a major role in a new project, especially one that the department is keen on. If you have 2-3 good relationships with professors, and 1 with someone in industry (your senior design project is a really good chance to do this) you will be the s***, especially coming from Case Western.</p>
<p>Look for a masters program w/o a thesis requirement (possibly a 1 year program). There's no reason to have a thesis if you want to go into industry (companies could care less how many papers you've published). Go for a school with a good name overall (Columbia, Stanford, MIT) as MBA admissions will be impressed more by the name of the school than your advisor. Also, think hard about getting the masters, is it worth loosing a year of work experience? You might be paid a little more, but spending $40,000 for a degree to make an additional $2,000 for 2 years while you get work experience seems like a bad tradeoff. (you'll actually be giving up $100,000 if you include the fact that you won't be paid $60,000 in salary AND you pay the full tuition at a top private school)</p>
<p>evoke1080, im not sure where you are getting your statistics for salary from but looking at the bureau of labor statistics (which provided more conservative numbers for salary than other websites), the average salary for a BME with a bachelors is $48,503, while the average salary with a masters is $59,667. I know that in a presentation at Case, the numbers were considerably higher than that but we can use these numbers for our purposes. I also find it hard to believe that companies would hire someone without a masters thesis over someone with a masters thesis. I think something that people tend to forget about BME is that it's more of a hard science than one would like to think and from what I could gather by talking to people who are in the field, working without a masters offers almost no upward mobility. Getting a PhD would probably be the best move, but I don't have the patience to get one hah.</p>
<p>urrjun, what made you change your plans to do a PhD? Also, where were you accepted if you don't mind me asking? Also, will an EE background really help me if im more interested in tissue engineering?</p>
<p>I changed my plan from a PhD because Im taking a year off and am doing research in Europe. I work with mostly PhDs and post-docs, so I got to see what I would probably be doing in the long run. I think I just need something where you are involved in broader interests, and I like the quantitative side of business (although I don't know anything).<br>
I was actually interested in tissue eng also. I was a little turned off because you spend a lot of time culturing cells, scheduling experiments, and ordering antibodies, cytokines, etc...you also don't get to see a lot of visible results, thats mostly for people doing the transplantation/in vivo stuff. A lot of the end work (in industry) involves electrophysiology in some way (mems, cardiac signals, etc). If you are doing industry, I think EE stuff is WAY more useful than cell biology.</p>
<p>Im deciding between Brown (masters) and marquette (phd). I dont have funding yet at Marquette (fellowships), so its pretty much up to me to find an RA. My adviser made it sound like essentially all PhDs get support, though...</p>
<p>The salaries Ive seen for BME are 50-70k/year for BS, and 60-80k year for MS. That might be because there are alot of big med device companies in the Midwest (Minnesota especially).</p>