(rhythmic music) - Hey everyone, welcome to The BME Life. So, I know it's been a while ever since I've uploaded a video, I know. Today we're gonna be talking
about different career paths that you could follow with a
biomedical engineering major. And, obviously, you're not limited to whatever I'm gonna mention, there's a lot of other
things you could do, this is just, I think,
the most general outline I could personally come up with, and from what I've
heard from my professors or industry professionals, so I just wanna share
with you because I know, whenever I started, I really had no idea of what
I could do with a BME degree. So, before getting into the video, I wanna take just a quick
second to thank everyone who supported The BME Life merch thing. Thank you all so much, every single one of you
for buying some merch, it really means a lot
to me, all your support. Some of you were my friends,
some of you were my family, but some of you were people
I didn't really know. So, I think that was really
cool that you guys supported me. So, thank you so much. And, I just wanted to let everyone know that whatever profit we
make from selling BME merch is actually being put back to the channel. So, for example, we'll be doing a battle of the engineer series that is gonna be really cool. It's gonna be a series where different engineering disciplines
will battle each other in a series of games just for fun, nothing challenging really. But, it's just a start, and it's gonna hopefully
become something bigger, and greater, and more challenging, but for now your support by
buying the merch has helped us do more things. So, if you would like
to support this channel, please go buy some merch. So just go @thebmelife, if you
are interested in any merch. So, anyways, just to
go back into the video, like I said, there's a lot
of things you can do in BME, so I'm just gonna go
briefly, or not briefly, but over the general outline of what you could do with a BME degree. So, the first thing you
can do with a BME degree is go into industry. And I feel like that's what
I personally want to do. At least, at the moment,
that's what my goal is. So, industry, can be divided
into different things. I think the bigger area is
the medical device industry. So, medical devices are instruments, or just devices that
can help prevent, treat, or diagnose medical conditions. So, for example, there's wound healing
medical device market, so, for example, Acelity KCI is a company
here in San Antonio. They do negative pressure therapy for wound healing treatments, and they're one of the biggest ones, if not the biggest one wound healing. So, that's something you could go into. Other medical devices could
include in the cardiac area. Like pacemakers, stents, things like that. So, medical devices, there's
all kinds of medical devices, it can be anything from scissors
to something really complex like an MRI machine. But, within the medical device industry, there's a lot of things you can do. So, for example, so some of
the positions you could have in a medical device company
would be a CEO, CTO, CFO. Obviously, all those
big executive positions, but also, you can be a project manager, you can be a product development engineer, quality assurance engineering, you could be an R&D engineer, just doing all the research
to support your product, or to add to the marketing
strategy of your device. Something else you can do is
manufacturing engineering, or sales and marketing. There's a lot of things. And those are just some examples. Another thing industry is the big pharma, all the pharmaceutical
companies that do drugs. I would think that's more
like chemical engineering. It can be a lot of manufacturing, a lot of research and development so, that's also something you can do if you're interested in creating drugs. But going along with that,
is also the food industry, and the makeup industry. So, another career path you could follow with BME is academia. Most of them have a PhDs,
and then you are a professor, but you also hold your lab and you're a principal
investigator to a lab that's focusing on a project or several projects in one area. So, for example, here at UTSA, we have three main concentrations, which is biomechanic, imaging, and tissue and cellular engineering. I used to be at a tissue engineering lab, I personally, I really liked it. All the cell culture was really fun, and just doing all this research and actually working hands-on
on a wet lab is really fun. Doing research is really honorable because they do it because they
have a passion for it. I think research is great. I personally want to follow
more the industry career path, but research would definitely be something I would be interested in also. And a lot of companies
actually get their ideas from, they get them from academia,
they license technologies and they put them in the market. Another career path you
could follow his healthcare. It was really surprising to me that, when I came into the
BME program I saw that quite a few of my classmates were actually wanting to
go into medical school after getting their
biomedical engineering degree. I believe that biomedical
engineering is a great alternative if you wanna go into medical school, rather than doing biology or premed, you could do biomedical engineering if you wanna take more of a challenge. I've heard that medical schools like that, and an engineering degree
you were taught how to think. Within think, I mean
more like solve problems. And biomedical engineering
is a great program because it gives you the engineering and the biomedical background, and then you have some sort of advantage when you go into medical school. There is, right now, a lot of PhD and MD
programs that you can do. You can decide and you just
feel like you wanna do both, it's definitely very ambitious,
a very ambitious program. But I think there's people that just have a real passion for it. So, if that's you, I
think a PhD and MD program would be great. And, if you see yourself
in a hospital environment but are not really feeling
the doctor or surgery stuff, or you just don't wanna spend that much time in school anymore? Another thing you can do is become some sort of technical expert. So, for example, I was actually
considering this program at UT Health in Houston. Their program was a
cardiac device specialist. That was their title, I think. And it was a six month program where you basically get a certificate for being a cardiac specialist, and they teach you electrophysiology, and all the devices that they
use for the electrical mapping of the heart, and just
different devices and instrument that you would use with a cardiologist or an electrophysiologist. And when you finish that
program, you work with a doctor. You can do a lot with it, you can work for a cardiac device company. The reason why I decided
to not go with it, even though I do have some sort of passion for the cardiac area of medicine, I didn't wanna do it because
it was very expensive. It's like a Masters, what you would expect
to pay for a Masters, so around 30,000, but you're
not getting a Masters. You're just getting a certification. However, with that certification, you can get really good job positions. According to the program description, you could get paid up to like
300,000, between 90 and 300k. So, if you want something quick, and if you're interested
in working at the hospital with patients, and working
closely with a doctor, I think that's a great program. I'm sure there's other programs
for other medical fields that are not cardiology. Just look it up if you're interested. I will leave the link down below if you're interested in that program. I think it's really cool. Next, we have a very
interesting side of BME, which is the legal stuff. So, I know, there is patent attorneys. There's all the FDA regulations that companies have to go through. With a BME degree, you can work
for the FDA or other agency that's a patent examiner. I heard that the FDA pays really well and they do some sort of rotation program. I'm not too sure about this, but one time in one of my classes I heard that another thing you can do in the legal side of
BME is work for the FBI or some other similar agency, with determining, for example,
if there's a car crash, and someone dies in a car crash, you can help determine
how exactly they died. I'm honestly not really sure about that, but I've heard it before. So, you could just look into it if that's something you're interested in. So, just to go back to
the industry career path. There're some industries that are not pharma or medical devices that a BME could go into. For example, NASA, space
exploration and SpaceX, all those people require
biomedical engineers. One time I applied for an internship where NASA was doing
some sort of cell culture under space missions. Or, they also need to study
how gravitational forces affect the human body throughout the years. Another company that's awesome doing BME related stuff is Apple. As you guys know Apple,
they have their Apple Watch that can do, now, an ECG. It's just nice to have something
I can help people just feel more confident and just be able to monitor their health more regularly. Apple is definitely a great
company, very innovative. I'm sorry my microphone just died, but I just wanted to wrap
up this video and say that, I really wanted to do
this career path outline just to introduce the concept, because I wanna start
uploading more videos about it. So, basically, talk about different biomedical engineering companies that you could work at, or that exist. And just talk about them and what they do. Just so you can get
more familiar with them. And it would also help me
get more familiar with them. And other than that, also maybe talk about specific
decisions that you can have as a biomedical engineer, and what kind of experience
you need to obtain that. Salaries are very important,
so expected salaries. I really wanna do that because I really wanna put
more informational content in this channel. And I want you guys to learn
things from this channel. So that's why I wanna do this. And it's also gonna help me learn, because I'm half a year
away from graduating so, I need to learn this already. Anyways, thank you guys so
much for watching this video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
