BME Career Paths // Things You Can Do with a Biomedical Engineering Degree

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(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.
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Channel: The BME Life
Views: 41,398
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: medical devices, biomedical engineering, bme, engineering, industry, company, biomedical, biomed, pharma, big pharma, pharmaceuticals, drugs, devices, stents, pacemakers, legal, NASA, bioengineering, FBI, FDA, regulatory, patent law, utsa, san antonio, JNJ, johnson and johnson, medtronic, abbott, apple, chemical engineering, college, the bme life, brazil, captions in brazil, brazilian engineer, United States Engineer
Id: l9dFMO09wB0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)
Published: Tue Nov 12 2019
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