As the job market for skilled biomedical engineers grows and the entry-level educational requirements steadily rise, many graduate schools are adding and expanding biomedical engineering programs. The growing number of available biomedical engineering schools should enable you to find a reputable graduate program that fulfills your goals and is close to home.
What Biomedical Engineering Program Should You Be Looking For?
When choosing a graduate school, you need to be aware of each potential program’s focus and the placement success its recent graduates have experienced. Some programs orient themselves toward industry and put an emphasis on design projects and industrial careers. Other programs place greater emphasis on research and development. You want to be certain to find the program that fits well with your goals.
Careers in the interdisciplinary field of biomedical engineering, and the graduate programs leading to them, are extremely diverse and cover a variety of areas that include, but are not limited to:
- Bioelectrical and neural engineering
- Biomaterials
- Biomechanics and biotransport
- Biomedical devices and instrumentation
- Biomedical imaging and optics
- Molecular, cellular, and tissue engineering
- Systems and integrative engineering
How Will You Reach Your Goal?
According to the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), a professional society for biomedical engineering and bioengineering, the first step in becoming a good biomedical engineer is to simply be a good engineer. As those skills are learned, you then need to develop a working understanding of the life sciences and terminology.
In addition to helping you be a good engineer, the right program should assist you in obtaining valuable biomedical research experience at the master’s and doctoral levels. It is increasingly important for graduates entering the job market to be able to show that they have a set of well-defined engineering skills that are applicable to the biomedical field and that they possess project or in-the-field experience in biomedical engineering.
