January 5, 2004
A: FROM MENTOR LESLIE WAITE IN CA
Hi Jennifer!
What great questions- I am glad you found GEM-SET so you have some
help answering them!
First, many of your questions are addressed on the site for the
Biomedical Engineering Society's careers page:
http://www.bmes.org/careers.asp

I got this general description off of the University of
Illinois-Urbana Champaign's web site (see below for link):

WHAT IS BIOENGINEERING?

Bioengineering combines the analytical and experimental methods of
the engineering profession with the biological and medical sciences
to achieve a more detailed understanding of biological phenomena and
to develop new techniques and devices. The engineer's quantitative
and analytical approach; traditional competence in the processing and
control of information, energy, and materials; and ability to design
and analyze systems are powerful tools when applied to biology,
medicine; and quantitative studies of relationships between
biological systems and their environments.

Bioengineers deal with a wide variety of problems. Graduates may work
as biomedical engineers with medical practitioners to develop new
medical techniques, medical devices, and instrumentation for
manufacturing companies. Clinical engineers work in hospitals and
clinics to maintain and improve the vast amount of technological
support required in modern medicine. With advanced degrees in the
various fields of bioengineering, some graduates perform basic
research related to biology and medicine in the research laboratories
of educational and governmental institutions or in the medical
industries.

As to your specific questions:
>1) Is it easy to obtain a job? What kind of job? A job in a laboratory?

Bioengineering is a growing field right now, so it should be a good
field to get a job in for a while.

>2) What are the prerequisites to obtaining a job related to bioengineering?
>a PhD? creativity? sleight in hand?

This depends on what you want to do, but good jobs should be
available with a Bachelor's degree in bioengineering, or a closely
related major. I think bioengineering (most science and engineering
actually) has great potential for creative people, so if you are
creative, that will be a good plus.

>3) What are some good schools that are famous for bioengineering? Famous
>professors?
>Any Nobel prize winners who received the award due to success in
>bioengineering?

One of the oldest is the University of California San Diego, whose
dept began in 1966.
http://www-bioeng.ucsd.edu/

As for Nobel prizes, just this year Professor Paul Lauterbur won the
Nobel Prize in Physiology for his work in developing Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (MRI). Developing new technologies that help in
diagnostic medicine is one field of bioengineering, and Dr. Lauterbur
holds an appointment in the Bioengineering dept. of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (my alma mater!)
http://www.bioen.uiuc.edu/
The University of Illinois at Chicago also has a bioengineering dept
that is a bit older than Urbana's:
http://www.uic.edu/depts/bioe/

>4) I'm in 10th grade right know, and I want to start preparing for my major.
>Are biology and math the only subjects that I need to excel in [at this
>point]?

For an engineering major, you should also be taking some physics classes.

>5) What courses do I need to take in college for a major in biochemistry?

My major was biochemistry, and I had to take:
Math through two semesters of calculus (engineers had to take three semesters)
three semesters of physics
Two semesters of basic chemistry
Organic chemistry (two semesters and a lab)
Quantitative Chemistry (inorganic I think)
2 more electives in chemistry
Basic Biology
Biochemistry- 1 year plus a lab course

I think this was all of the science and math that was required; I
also had to take general requirements (foreign language, humanities,
etc.), but these were required of all students in my college,
regardless of major.

>6) My school offers Computer Science. Should I take it to benefit my future
>major?

Yes- I think that a computer science background is always helpful to
science and engineering majors.

>Thank you so much in advance! I had these questions for a long time, but I
had no one to ask them to. But now I finally do!

Good luck! Write back with more questions as you think of them!
***********************
A: FROM MENTOR DENISE HARBERT IN IL

Hi Jennifer!

Before I forget, please send the first letter of your last name and the
state you live in when you write in questions. I used to work for GEM-SET
and it was hard for me to match up student questions to their application
data without that extra information, particularly for students with common
names like yours!

You have asked some excellent questions! I think I could write 1-2 pages
on each one of your questions, so I'm only going to try to answer a few of
them for now. If you don't get a lot of responses from the GEM-SET
mentors, please don't be discouraged! Try writing back again and try
breaking down your questions into smaller pieces that would be shorter to
answer. You can ask a dozen questions a month if you'd like, or ask a
similar question spaced several months apart to see if different mentors
answer it with different perspectives. You might be surprised to find that
a few short, specific questions may get you a lot more information than one
really long and broad question!

My first impression is that your decision to pursue bioengineering may be a
little premature. I understand your need to start working toward a goal,
but there are many different majors in the areas you're interested in and
10th grade is pretty early in your academic career for you to be locking
yourself into a decision. In your question, you mentioned that you like
biology and math and that you know bioengineering combines biology and
engineering. However, you also mentioned biochemistry and computer science
as potential interests. Biology, math, biochemistry, and computer science
are usually liberal arts majors, which are generally located in a
university's "College of Letters and Science" program. Engineering majors
are typically located in a university's "College of Engineering"
program. Typically, engineering is a career path where you learn to design
and build things, while science is a career path where you use the objects
engineers build in order to study something more abstract. Another GEM-SET
student named SUNG C. IN TX asked a question about science and engineering
interests this week. You should read through the answers she got as well!

In the areas you're interested in, there are several routes to go. You
could go liberal arts and double major in several of the subjects you
mentioned (biology, math, biochemistry, computer science). Then you could
get a job in either a lab applying the specific knowledge you learned or in
a business where you could apply your scientific problem-solving abilities
to a completely unrelated business field. Another GEM-SET student named
PUI F. IN IL asked a question this week about whether a liberal arts
science degree would limit her job opportunities, so check out her
answers! Or, you could go the engineering route, which could also lead you
to a job that is specific to your engineering major, or that is in a
completely unrelated business field. Bioengineering requires being good in
math, but it also has a lot of hands-on, mechanism type classes that do
require some manual dexterity. Depending on who you ask or what university
you attend, there may be several bio-related majors in engineering. These
fields are much newer than the liberal arts fields mentioned in parentheses
above, so the words used to describe them are not as consistent or
well-defined across universities yet.

Bio-related engineering tends to be more strongly related to medicine and
medical fields than it is to biology (but medicine is really somewhat of an
extension of biology, depending on how you look at it). Biomedical
engineering involves building the medical equipment that hospitals and
patients with chronic diseases use: heart rate monitors, electronic beds,
paging systems, medical trays, oxygen pumps, scopes that connect to large
screen monitors, etc. This field has some overlap with mechanical
engineering (creates mechanical devices) and nuclear engineering (creates
devices with radioactive materials like in x-ray machines, chemotherapy,
radiation therapy). Other types of bio-related engineering have very
similar counterparts in liberal arts majors and are hard to describe
without first describing the liberal arts major. For example, a biochemist
(liberal arts) might discover something new about DNA and the presence of
various diseases, or a disease's relationship to the presence or absence of
various DNA markers. However, a biochemical engineer might be needed to
figure out how to apply that knowledge to modern medicine and mass produce
it across DNA labs all over the country. Likewise, a chemist might create
a new soap or dishwashing detergent, but a chemical engineer would be
needed to figure out how to make large quantities of the new product
cheaply enough so that the manufacturer can make a profit at it. A
biochemist might create a new drug that slowly passes through FDA clinical
trials, but once the FDA approves the drug for national distribution to the
public, a biochemical engineer would be needed to mass produce the drug for
distribution to pharmacies. A biostatistican would be needed to analyze
the data from the FDA clinical trials to prove that a drug is safe before
it can be released to the public. Biostatistics is a field that applies
statistics (a type of applied math that you might enjoy) to biological
systems or medical fields. Related to biostatistics is epidemiology, a
field that studies the incidence, spread, and control of disease in
biological systems. Both biostatistics and epidemiology require knowledge
of both math and biology. Biotechnology or biotechnical engineering are
fields that currently tend to focus on creating and mass producing
laboratory testing techniques.

At some point in the next 10-20 years, biotechnology could possibly combine
with robotics or robotic engineering to create a new and booming field that
is still in the visionary stages - biorobotics or nano robotics. If you've
ever watched any TV episodes from Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda or reruns of
Star Trek The Next Generation, you might have heard about the science
fiction "nanobots", which are miniature make-believe robots that are placed
into the blood stream to do good (and bad) things to a person's body from
the inside. Believe it or not, this technology is probably going to be
reality at some point in our lifetimes. Right now, researchers are already
imagining little robots that can go into a person's arteries and clean them
out without having to do the invasive surgeries we do today. Some
experimentation is already happening, but many people are still
uncomfortable with the idea and may be slow to adopt the technology because
the idea is a little creepy. But, oddly enough, many of the technologies
we have today were invented because a science fiction writer presented the
idea first. Think of escalators, the long flat conveyor belts at airports,
doors that open by themselves when someone walks up to them, laser "guns"
that can shoot targets from space, cordless communicator devices that
allowed people to talk to someone in space or on the other side of a
planet, and even voice activated computer systems that can answer questions
when you ask them. All of these things exist today and some are owned by a
majority of Americans. But all of these ideas were fairly radical
inventions when TV shows like the Jetsons and Star Trek showed them
first. It's only a matter of time before nanobots get there too.

Basically, there are dozens of fields related to math and biology that you
could be good at. You have a fairly evenly split number of opportunities,
regardless of whether you decide to go the liberal arts route or
engineering route. I do highly recommend that you familiarize yourself
with learning about computers, but majoring in computer science is not the
only way to do this. A lot of majors, particularly statistics and
engineering, require you to use various computer software programs as a
tool to complete the tasks in your applied field. There are different
types of computer classes. The programming classes may not be as necessary
to you in most of the bio careers I listed above, but classes that teach
you how to use various software programs are extremely important. For
example, a lot of engineers use CAD or CAID programs for Computer Aided
Design. A lot of business people use the Microsoft Office Suite (Word,
Excel, PowerPoint, Access). A lot of statisticians tend to use either SAS
or SPSS, but other software is available as well. Almost every career will
require you to know how to use email and the internet.

I hope I have given you more questions to think about. Please don't limit
yourself to one career in 10th grade. You have a long way to go yet and
you still have a lot of things to learn about yourself and what's out there
before you can be sure you're headed in the right direction!