How tough is Biomedical Engineering

KamelAkbar
Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:21:32 +0000

An Engineering GPA of 3.5 is approximately equivalent to a Biology GPA of 3.9



Possibly the most blatantly incorrect statement I’ve seen on these forums. An engineering GPA according to actual statistics of students admitted to medical school is given virtually no extra weight.

Unfortunately for engineering premeds, med school admissions is a GPA/MCAT game, the higher the better.

PLEASE look this up and do not be misled by people like the above poster who feel that just because engineering seems harder than other majors they must have more weight in med school admissions. It’s your future, don’t take my word for it and don’t take alchemist007’s word for it either. Find the statistics, they are widely available.

Also, this statement seems to make the assumption that a 3.5 is equivalent to a 3.9 in biology. That is also statistically incorrect. At Georgia Tech, for example, the average GPA of engineering majors is HIGHER than pure science majors like biochem, bio, and chem.

In response to your questions:

1. I don’t believe biology at the college level is all about memorization, but I (as a non-BME engineering student) haven’t taken bio. But to answer your question, all engineering majors will be about critical thinking and problem solving and while you will need to learn lots of information and theories, you will be required to apply them as well. Your tests won’t ask you what velocity is, they’ll make you figure out what initial velocity an arrow needs to have to hit a falling coconut. Engineering majors are all similar (perhaps save Industrial). BME will involve a lot of physics like any other engineering major.


Depends on the school but it should be generally the same. Everyone likes to sit around and talk about which engineering major is harder. The truth is they are pretty similar in difficulty for the most part.
BME job prospects aren’t as good as other engineering majors. CompE grads have average-ish job prospects. A lot of them end up being programmers rather than hardware guys. Pay is pretty situational. Payscale.com and BLS.gov can give you some very generalized statistics, but they depend on region, school, GPA, etc. Engineering job prospects are extremely cyclical. In 2005, civil engineers were making bank. In the middle of the recession, nobody was building anything. Salary for both majors is rumored to be similar, for those who do find jobs in their field.