Transcript for:
Why I Chose Biomedical Engineering

hey everyone what's up it's rhea and welcome back to my channel if you're new here make sure to subscribe down below give this video a like and we can get right on into the video today i have a pretty fun video and in today's video i'm going to be explaining why i chose biomedical engineering to major in in college so if you don't know that about me i went to syracuse university and i decided to study biomedical engineering and i finished in may 2020 so we're coming up on a whole year of being graduated which is insane to think about because i feel like i was just in college and the end of my college kind of like ripped away from me it doesn't even feel like i finished fully if that makes sense but we're gonna go into all about why i chose biomedical engineering the background of biomedical engineering and just talk about that so we can start with that right now so the first thing that i want to talk about is just the background of biomedical engineering like what is biomedical engineering what kind of jobs can you get with it different fields in biomedical engineering all of that so biomedical engineering is also commonly referred to as bioengineering or biological engineering there's quite a few different synonyms that go with it because bioengineering is a very very very broad field so some of them can be a subcategory of bioengineering or some of them can just be the same name just like bioengineering and biomedical engineering same exact thing so if i swap between the two names don't be surprised because i definitely call it both names all the time so i decided to google the definition of biomedical engineering because it's definitely been a long time since i looked it up and i wanted to say what the overarching statement of all biomedical engineering is and i'm just going to read it from my notebook because i don't know what it is by heart it's the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes so it's taking a bunch of math and science and engineering principles and putting it into like different designs or solving problems or it's a very broad category so i don't even know what else to say but it's like math and science and the application of it lots of problem solving is involved in any engineering field so there are different areas of focus in biomedical engineering and they can be biomaterials tissue engineering medical imaging biomedical electronics those are just a few areas of focus that is definitely not all of them like i will probably repeat 20 times it is a very very very broad field very broad field like you can do so many different things with a biomedical engineering degree and different fields that you can work in our medical devices which is what i work in now i work for a medical device company i've said this in a couple of videos and that's the field that i was always interested in when i was going through schooling so that's why i pursued a career in it but there's also research prosthetics pharmaceuticals way more fields that you can go into also and in the research category i know they can do like artificial organs or they can be focused on educational research there's a bunch of different things that go into it there's just a bunch and i cannot even fathom being able to compile them all into one video so if you are thinking about this i'm glad that you came to my video and that you're watching it but definitely do extensive research on what can be in the field because i am only naming some things that i know and it's not everything that's for sure and i wanted to talk about the schooling that is required to be a biomedical engineer it is a bachelor's degree it is four years but you can go on to pursue a master's or phd generally a lot of people who go for a phd is because they want to become a professor or they want to have research in the field and that's how you get your own research in this field is by getting your phd and then like focusing in on that and of course there's a very heavy focus in math chemistry biology physics and electrical engineering and that's pretty common across a lot of different engineering majors but biomedical engineering is very heavily focused in sciences such as chemistry physics and biology and you might be surprised i took a ton of chemistry like a ton i took like one less chemistry class than the chemical engineering majors because power field can be so heavily focused in chemistry as well that is like the little background that i will give you on the field and then i'm just gonna go into three different categories on reasons why i chose biomedical engineering and one is personal reasons one is schooling reasons and one is professional reasons so we're just gonna start with my personal reasons first and i remember being in high school and not knowing exactly what i wanted to do but i always knew that i wanted to be in the medical field because my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer my first year of high school and he made it through chemo he's in remission he's totally fine now which i'm forever grateful for but i saw what he had to go through and i always thought that it would be really awesome to be able to help someone who's going through the same thing and that can be done in this field and it could be done in many other ways but biomedical engineering would allow me to possibly pursue a career that would help in people who have cancer another personal reason that i chose biomedical engineering was that my grandfather had parkinson's disease and i saw all the struggles that he had to go through having that disease and how long term it can be because you can have it for many years before you know that you have it or show like visible symptoms of it and then it's like a lifelong thing you have it for the rest of your life there is no cure for it it's something that you have to live with and have to deal with and i just was there for his journey through that disease and those two personal instances of having someone in my life who had a major medical condition and just wanting to help other people who may have major medical conditions is something that really pushed me to want to be in this field and like i hinted at at the beginning a little bit i was always very very interested in the medical field in general when i was in third grade i wanted to be a surgeon and i always thought about nursing and i always thought about going to med school but i quickly realized i didn't want to do that i just didn't want to be in direct patient care i think i definitely would still consider nursing because i think i might like direct patient care but i knew i didn't want to be a doctor for sure because i did not want to go to school for many many many more years to come and i remember looking it up in high school not knowing what i wanted to do and i just typed in like jobs in the medical field majors that will allow you to work in the medical field and all of that and biomedical engineering popped up and i remember thinking i want to be an engineer engineers are boring like why would i go to school for that that just sounds boring and i mean all of it is not my favorite but it's not all boring and i definitely just had like a lens over engineering in general because my sister also went for engineering she went for chemical engineering and i felt like i didn't want to do what she was doing so i just kind of wrote off engineering but after thinking about it for a while and knowing that i like math and science i decided to really look into it and then i got really interested in prosthetics at first and then through my schooling it obviously changed and turned into being interested in medical devices more but i always knew that i wanted to be in the medical field and i wanted a job that would help people so that is why i chose biomedical engineering because i could be in the medical field and like a lot of you know i work in ors now so i work in a hospital around patients all the time and i'm helping their surgeries go on which is so cool and that's directly helping them and helping any condition or anything that they might need help with so it's really awesome to have a job where you can see that it genuinely helps people and impacts their life and now i'll go into the schooling reasons and why the schooling around biomedical engineering kind of enticed me to want to do it so it requires a bachelor's degree which is four years of schooling and it's one of the only majors out there that requires only four years of higher education a lot of engineering actually is the same but it was a type of engineering that i was interested in that required only four years of schooling because many majors require you to get at least a master's so that's at least six years of schooling but i only had to do four and i could start in the industry right after i graduated with my bachelor's degree so i really enjoyed only having to go for four years and not having to worry about getting a master's or a phd because i definitely just was kind of over school by the end of it another reason that i chose the degree is because it's very heavily in math and science based and it's all about problem solving so like i said you have to take a lot of chemistry a lot of biology a lot of math like i took so many math classes i think four and it's all super heavily focused on those types of classes and i've always enjoyed those i always excelled in those throughout my schooling like literally from kindergarten to college that's what really brought me to wanting to be in that field because i knew i could do well in them i figured out i don't like physics though so you might go to school and then realize actually i don't like all sciences because some of them are really hard or they just don't make sense to you and that was the case with me in physics but then you just kind of can choose a job or choose a position that isn't heavily focused in that so it's kind of cool that it's very heavily math science based but you can figure out what you don't like during school and then just not go for a job that requires that afterwards and that's where like the flexibility of the field comes in that i really enjoy too and then the last schooling reason was syracuse university was my dream school my whole entire life my dad loved su and the sports behind it and it's a very very good school too especially for engineering i think i got a very good education my sister also went to su which wasn't in my plan when i was planning on going to school but she eventually transferred there and then i got to go there with her and like i said seo was just my dream school and offered it and biomedical engineering wasn't offered at a lot of schools close to my home so it was just like a check check check on wanting to go there and wanting to go there for biomedical engineering and the last category that i'm going to talk about is professional reasons on why i wanted to go in biomedical engineering and one of them was obviously salary like everyone looks at the salary of the job that they think that they want to have someday and it's a pretty good salary to start out i mean most engineers are and that's obviously not the top reason on why i chose it but it's something that everyone considers when they're trying to pursue a certain career the salary is good especially for only needing a four-year degree you honestly can't beat it if you like engineering so that's one of the reasons that i chose it another reason that i chose it is the employment projection of biomedical engineering i remember being back in high school and they talked about how that field was just on the rise and how they were going to need more of them and they expect the field to grow 5 between 2019 and 2029 which is higher than the average of the projection of all positions in the us so it's really a good path to go into and knowing that you'll be able to find a career afterwards and that the jobs are needed i remember being in high school and thinking oh dang that's like a field that's poppin like they need more of those and this wasn't expected but the pandemic actually created it so that there will need to be more biomedical engineers in the future who do you think is working on the vaccines and all the research behind this whole crazy thing engineers they're in there researching it so it actually has helped our field in a way it definitely hasn't helped the world in general but helped the field and the need for more bioengineers and i got that statistic from the bureau of labor statistics so don't think i just went like making it up or anything like that i made sure i knew exactly what it was so it's on the up and i think engineers are always going to be needed and the last professional reason that i chose biomedical engineering was that it is such a broad field so there are so many different types of jobs that you can do with a degree in bioengineering and i really enjoyed that because it gave me hope that if i didn't like a job that i came across or worked for for a while that's not the end all be all like there's so many other places i can go so many other jobs i can try so many other fields or subcategories to hop into you're not like stuck to doing a certain job like you have so many different opportunities a lot of engineers even go into business or they're going to consulting or i know some that have worked for banks you can do so many different things because i think a lot of companies like to hire engineers because they know that they can think on the spot and that they can problem solve in so many different situations that is one thing that i really liked about bioengineering and engineering in general is that you can do so many different things like an abundance of different jobs are open to engineers supply chain management like i said consulting research you're not stuck to like one path you have very many different branches that you can go off into that just made me excited because that meant that i wasn't stuck to doing a certain thing for the rest of my life so there are some reasons that i wanted to go into biomedical engineering definitely not all of them definitely not everything you need to know about biomedical engineering this is just like a personal thing that i chose and that i know about and there's plenty plenty more to learn about it and these are just the reasons i chose biomedical engineering and honestly why i thought i would like it and now i love it at least my job i love and i didn't even talk about like my experience of finding a job or my experience of schooling so if you would ever like to hear about how i found a job so quickly after graduation only two months or if you want to know more about my schooling itself the types of classes i had to take how hard it actually was because everyone always says oh engineering it must be so hard and it is but i could go into more detail about that so if you would like to hear more about the field in general or the schooling or more of my experiences in it please comment down below and let me know but that is the end of today's video i hope you enjoyed i hope a future bioengineer finds this video and gets some helpful information out of it or helps them decide if they want to go in the field or not and that's pretty much all i wanted out of this video is helping a future engineer figure out if they want to do it or not thank you guys so much for watching i hope you enjoyed make sure to subscribe down below for a little more engineering content obviously lifestyle content and beauty content because that's what i post the most of but this is also another aspect of my life that i would like to document and stay tuned for my next video because i'm hoping to do a decluttering of my closet which if you guys could see my closets it's a lot so it would be a big video to do and make sure to comment down below if you would like to see more about bioengineering and give this video a like and i will see you guys in the next one bye