Your Guide to Becoming A Biomedical Engineer

One intimidating part after high school is deciding your career – there needs to be a lot of effort and research put into that decision. I too struggled with this problem, as I invested a lot of time into exploring different career options. In this blog, I will be sharing information about biomedical engineering and the paths for it, as a viable career option. I hope you find it interesting and enjoy learning about it!

What is Biomedical Engineering?

Biomedical Engineering is a field that interacts engineering and healthcare. Medicine is about diagnosis, presentation, and treatment of disease. Engineering is about identifying problems, developing designs, and solutions. Biomedical Engineering is the combination of both trying to solve problems in medicine. In other words, it works on creating different engineering tools to address challenges in human and animal health. 

Statistics

The field of biomedical engineering is rapidly growing; according to the U.S Department of Labour, it has experienced about 72% growth from 2006-2018. Currently, it is one of the fastest growing industries in employment, with 5% growth from 2022-2032 (US Department of Labour, 2023). There are about 19,700 biomedical engineers in the USA (as of 2022), and that number is continually expanding (US Department of Labour, 2023). Lastly, according to the Medtech foundation, it is also made up of 40% women, which is the second highest percent of women in engineering.

Course Pathways

Now that we have established the statistics of biomedical engineering, and its growth, we can look at the path to getting there.

During high school, the courses you need to take are:

• English 30-1
• Math 30
• Math 31
• Physics 30
• Chemistry 30
• Biology 30 (recommended)

They can be different sorts of degrees or courses taken in university to be lead onto this career pathway: 

• • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. 
  • Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics. 
  • Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering. 
  • Bachelor of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering (or bioengineering). 

–Note: These are different courses within each post-secondary institution, however there is no set pathway or required courses to go into these fields. These are just some of the traditional pathways available.

In terms of further education after a bachelor’s degree, these degrees are recommended:

• • Masters/Ph.D in Biomedical engineering. 
  • Masters/Ph.D in Computer Science. 

Job Opportunities

There are a lot of potential in career opportunities available in the field as it is one of the fastest growing careers with a huge number of employment opportunities. You could chose to place in clinical areas like tissue/cell engineering or fields like medical imaging/instrumentation devices. Here are some of the leading biomedical companies that one could work in:

Microsoft Health

• Has a biomedical machine learning group that focuses on machine learning aspects in healthcare, cancer biology, precision medicine, neurodegenerative disease, and medical imaging; generative models of molecules, proteins, and chemical reactions; computational immunology; and statistical genetics.

Google Health

• Work in healthcare research as well as AI Imaging & Diagnosis. 
• Developed the use of AI in a breast-cancer predicting model. 

Johnson & Johnson

Pfizer

Abbot

Medtronic

Why Chose Biomedical Engineering?

Personally, I love computer science and engineering, the types of problem-solving techniques, applications, and principles used, really excites me. On the other hand, I love biology, and the medical sciences; researching in and learning about the human body and medical diseases is one of my favourite subjects. Biomedical Engineering is the perfect combination of the two. I get to use computer science and engineering skills and apply it to the medical problems, to create life-saving technology, which is why I think biomedical engineering is a great career option to pursue. 

I hope the information I presented to you about the biomedical engineering field was useful and can help you with your future plans! Please comment down below if you want more blogs related to information about potential careers.

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