Is Hopkins BME worth debt?

tanman
Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:59:41 +0000

As a BME alum, I can tell you that it’s not a cake walk. Your classmates in the program will be extremely smart kids, and you won’t be able to breeze by like many BME students did in high school. The work is certainly not easy by any means, and with a group of very smart classmates, you’re going to have really smart kids that fall in the lower half of the class. That said, the work is hard for everyone and students end up supporting each other and working together to get through problem sets and exam studying. What matters in the long run are going to be your final grades (not your BME rank, which isn’t even on your transcript) and everything else you do in college (ie research, internships etc).



ChrisTKD:

More importantly the labs at JHU are not worldclass.

I would strongly argue with this assertion. Hopkins “prestige” in the BME arena is based on peer scoring/evaluation, which I believe is highly affected by research reputation. The labs at Hopkins are truly among the leaders in their fields, and I bet that most people in BME academia have heard of the likes of Jennifer Elisseeff, David Yue, Artin Shoukas, Nitish Thakor etc etc if they’re doing research in the same fields as those researchers. I’ll admit I know little about pure-chemical engineering research, so I can’t tell you if the same is true there, but I do know that Hopkins BME has many very strong labs, all of which are open to undergraduates