What Can I do With a Biomedical Engineering Degree?

Are you interested in pursuing a biomedical engineering degree?  Not particularly enthusiastic about working in the corporate world? Here’s some good news – you have options! There are several potential career paths in different sectors for students who are interested in majoring in biomedical engineering. It’s a great time to explore the possibilities. The field is expected to grow 23 percent between 2014 and 2024, compared to an average growth of 6.5 percent for all jobs over that time period.

Corporate Work with a Biomedical Engineering Degree

Working for a corporation is one option for biomedical engineers. Corporations are hard at work developing and manufacturing technologies that help people cope with medical problems.  You can even help people overcome serious issues like heart or other organ failure and limb amputation. Corporate biomedical engineers might work with a team to create new products. They also improve existing ones and they test products before putting them on the market.

Corporations are often more focused on making profits than other sectors of biomedical engineering. However, they are also on the cutting edge of technologies that have a direct, positive impact on people’s lives. Teamwork and collaboration are important skills to develop for a corporate biomedical engineering career.

Academic Work with a Biomedical Engineering Degree

Biomedical engineers who work in academia may teach, conduct research or serve their communities in other ways. Furthermore a career in academia may offer more freedom to conduct research in a preferred area. In addition it may also offer greater job security once you receive tenure.

Other positive aspects of a career in academia include mentoring others, traveling around the world and presenting your research to others. A career in academia can help you stay on top of the latest advances in medical technologies as well.

Clinical Work with a Biomedical Engineering Degree

Some biomedical engineering students go on to medical school and become doctors who care for patients. Biomedical engineers may become specialists or surgeons that implement biomedical engineering solutions for patients. They could also be primary care physicians and general care doctors.

Policy Work with a Biomedical Engineering Degree

Every aspect of the health care field has come under increasing regulation in recent years and biomedical engineering is no exception. One career path for biomedical engineers is to work with lawmakers or an organization that influences or petitions lawmakers about public policy in the biomedical engineering field.

Policy work could also include grant writing and proposals for funding of various research and health initiatives in biomedical engineering. This career track could also include working with lawyers on court cases that could effect public policy in biomedical engineering.

Florida Tech offers a biomedical engineering degree program that prepares students for any of these career track options with small class sizes and opportunities to do research and participate in internships. Learn more about our Biomedical Engineering program today!