Choosing Biomedical Engineering: What did I study in school? How did I get my job?

good morning how are you just calling to see if there's any cases or patients for us today okay well let me know if anything changes I'm on for today all right bye have a good one good morning guys ooh hot hot hot so because of the ongoing pandemic there isn't much cases going on other than emergency cases so I spend my time mostly doing remote viewing because you could see patients online or training there's always always training anyway since it is a little slower I thought I could finally finally I guess make a video going warn in debt about my career and how I got here and what I studied in school and how I got my job I was pretty surprised about how popular my day in the life of a biomedical engineer video got I got a lot of questions about you know what did I study how did I get there what am i doing how did I get the job just just start it off though I am NOT an expert on the field biomedical engineering is a very very very broad field and also relatively new so I can only really talk about my experiences I'm personally in the medical device field but even within that there are so many different components you could be in the beginning and the design production could be in the development and the research clinical studies or where I am which is in the field and even within that there's so many different subdivisions I am in the cardiac division and even within that I'm gonna specified part of it because there's also valves and stents and catheters and sheets and etc etc etc so it is a very very vast field and then within medical devices we have hip and joint replacements we have pumps and we have deep tissue nerve stimulators a I mean the ranges is crazy and it can also depend on what your interest is and what is available for a job search outside of medical devices there's even more mmm right so just to get it out of the way first of all I am NOT a doctor I did not go to medical school I got on a couple comments asking about my medical school experience and I did not go to medical school although that is something you could do with a biomedical engineering degree because at least in my school it fit the prerequisites to go to medical school I thought about it but I think ultimately I decided that being a doctor is not really for me but I went to pretty much all Engineering College as an undecided engineer and my freshman year I learned about The DaVinci robots which are these robots that can perform surgery as controlled by doctors and they have they cause like really small incisions and I just thought it was really really cool so I decided to become go into the biomedical engineering major and then from there I found an interest in tissue engineering so like I said very very broad I went from going in because of these machine surgery robots and then I went directly into tissue engineering and I thought that was really cool that's what I spent my sophomore and junior year working on during the summer I worked in one of the labs at my school with a PhD student and then my my junior year actually had my own mini project off of that we were making conduits nerve conduits out of polymers and I was doing testing tensile testing and just stress testing to see how close they would be to a normal body's nerve so that was my project I thought it was really cool I thought that's what I wanted to do I even thought about going into getting my PhD but after being in a lab by myself for 10 hours a day all summer socially and mentally it was not for me so after that in my senior year I did a project on dental tools so completely different we actually had to create a prototype for it and it was picked up by a couple investors and there was a patent and there was whole talk about maybe starting up our own company so that was also a pathway I guess for a career option with my degree it is much later now I actually had to get on a work call and do a couple of training modules and things like that and it's actually almost around dinner time I'm gonna start making dinner and continue so was the last thing College project was a dental tool that got picked up by a couple investors and for a hot second contemplating a startup but honestly I wasn't really interested in dentistry or dental tools that much that I would want to make a full company project out of it and also because we were students a majority like 70% of our company if we ever started it would have been owned by the school so we ended up just all of us me my team members selling I guess our rights to the patent for like a dollar to the school and that was the end of that we actually wanted an award but I have somewhere this is where I keep my stuff in the dark closet corner uh boos and actually my diplomas in here tail isn't that this this is what I do with the wards I am I keep them in the dark corner in my closet I don't care I just you know makes me feel cool like to hang it I'm not I'm not an awards like hanging up awards type of person so I'm gonna go put this back in the closet I basically graduated and started looking for a job not gonna lie it was really difficult because I didn't really have any industry experience so after a couple of months I went to another job fair through my school and that's where I found the current company I work for and after a really really really intense interview process I mean I had four different interviews and the last one lasted four hours of just grilling technical questions and like scenarios or like how would you do this if this happened and if you're in the or and this happened how would you react to that type of situation after all of that I did not get the job because I required a driver's license and a car and I did not have either but they kept me on hold until I got it and then they were able to put me in another position so that's why I say it's really important to have those connections and make a good connection because they're gonna go to you first before they go to a random person on an online application I'm just saying that because I had a lot of people ask me about finding a job in biomedical engineering and I mean I've been working for six years now I'm not really sure how things are right now and also with the current pandemic and economic crisis but it is a growing medical field there are going to always require people so just hang in tight if your job searching right now they hired me on and I got trained it took Oh for me to be fully trained and before I could see patients on my own and support surgeries on my own exams and tests as well as in-person testing and sign off to parts which is the follow-up which is seeing patients and clinics and checking and troubleshooting the implanted pacemakers and then the second part is supporting surgeries where you where you help the doctors map out the heart and take some measurements invasively from the pocket from the surgical pocket anyway um after that the next year I took my board I guess part a cardiac rhythm specialist exam that was really tough it took all your studying to get through it I have that certification somewhere to actually it's probably in the same dark closet heart rhythm certification with my little certificate and there's even letters behind my name I didn't even know I just do my job oh that's basically how I got to where I am today I'm gonna go have a quick walk outside and breathe some fresh air through a mask and until Carla comes home and then we'll have some dinner if you have any more questions you can leave them in the comments below I will do my best to answer them and I hope everybody's staying healthy and safe I'll see you in Linux [Music] you

Channel: The Adventures of Rah

Views: 41,992

Keywords: bme, biomedical engineering, engineering degree

Id: eIrUj5JGUeY

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020