What is Biomedical Engineering & Why is it the BEST Major!! Part I

biomedical engineering what is it i mean is it biology is it becoming almost a doctor is it engineering not really let's talk about this in today's video we're going to talk about what biomedical engineering is what you can get out of it and how much money can you actually make by studying this degree i mean hint did you check out my last video um okay all jokes aside i've pretty much done my undergrad in this field my master's in this field and now i've been working in this core field of biomedical engineering so i feel like i'm in a good position to talk a little bit about this fastest growing field in my opinion and i'll tell you why in just a couple minutes so let's get started with the video so biomedical engineering known as bioengineering in some cases bme whatever you call it is basically a stem field which is science technology engineering and mathematics so the idea is to use engineering principles to advance medicine so that we can make lives of doctors easier now this can be in the form of figuring out what it what the disease is or diagnosing a disease it can be in the form of treating a disease or therapeutic or it can be in the form of monitoring a disease so if you're leaning more towards the diagnostic side this includes things like all of your scans like your x-ray scans your ultrasound scans basically think of anything that you would go into a doctor's office when you need to find out what's wrong with you literally any piece of machine or equipment or technology that you use or step into is probably designed by a biomedical engineer and that's what the core curriculum of this degree involves so i still remember when i was studying this degree in my undergrad i had like separate courses for each machine like i literally had a course called ultrasound and its applications x-rays um neurology so basically the idea is i would have to first study about what the disease or what the problem was from like a human anatomy and physiology perspective and then we would be taught how we can use principles of physics mathematics technology basically to solve that problem so it's really like an intertwined degree like i i tell i tell a lot of people that if you don't like bio biology and you don't like math this is definitely not a degree for you but if you like both equally maybe biology even a little bit more than math you know this is like a perfect combination of that degree so that covers the diagnostic part of it now talking about the therapeutic part of it this involves monitoring the disease it can be stuff like your artificial organs instead of a clean amputation we you know give the ability to a patient to walk that is all thanks to artificial organs there are courses like orthopedics where you extensively study the reaction of your body and how different materials would uh react with it like think about it if you're cutting open an arm and you just stick like a steel or aluminum or titanium how do you know that your body is not going to reject that foreign piece of substance essentially what your body is going to do and this happens a lot we we literally study this in biomaterials endlessly is you there's something called biocompatibility where you need to study if your body will treat any foreign substance as like an attack so if it does that it'll start rejecting that and essentially your body will start shutting down but other things that are included in therapeutics involve stuff like drug delivery systems um all of your pills that you take like have you ever stopped to think about what it's actually doing remember you know how some tablets are just like tiny and round but then some are like capsules i don't know if you guys did this but when i was a kid i'd always like open those capsules up to see what's inside it would always be a powder i never really understood the point of the capsule that i'm like you know i could have just taken the powder it would have been smaller anyway that is the whole drug deal so basically understanding how you could effectively deliver that drug into your body what's the fastest way what's the safest way and is there a way we can improve this technique i know that there are a lot of doctors who eventually go into research and i'm not saying that they're not capable of doing this but the field of biomedical in engineering is precisely if you're interested in doing this so in short if i had to summarize this field it's basically that you you're not a doctor but you're very well working with diseases and how to treat them so i basically spoke about the broad areas of you know biomedical engineering and from everything that i've spoken up till now you guys probably have an idea that this field is pretty elaborate there are so many routes you can specialize in and shape your career that way now with that in mind i want to go over some of the specializations that you can do if you do decide to go into biomedical engineering not the easiest way to remember this is you can add bio in front of basically any engineering discipline there are bioelectronics like for example think about designing you know a chip that you could insert underneath your skin that would constantly read your entire body's like you know vitals that's by electronics there's biomaterials where again you study about how different substances foreign substances react with your body and what's biocompatible what your body is okay with and what it really doesn't like there's computational biology where you study a lot about how you can effectively analyze the data and what what's the most important information you can get out of it now think about it an x-ray scan is pretty much useless if someone doesn't know how to read it right that is all computation biology can you can we make things faster if a computer were to do it if there aren't enough doctors available to read the scan can we just run it through a matlab code where the output of that code would be all the things that we would need to know there's medical engineering as a whole separate discipline where we precisely think of different ways we can image is there a better imaging technique apart from x-rays mris ct scans where we can get more information so that we don't have to cut open a person or even if we have to do that in case of an injury or something we have the most amount of information available beforehand and then of course there's microbiology there's bio nano technology which again um pretty much going smaller and smaller into size um is there a faster way we can do this um think about something called an electronic pill like the pill that you actually take as a drug imagine the same pill but when you swallow it what it does is it kind of like turns into like this alien camera robotic thing it images your insides it takes pictures and it conveys that information through a bluetooth device through to your phone that way it just eliminates the whole need to do laparoscopic surgeries or exploratory um surgeries in any way like that would be so cool and i'm not just like making this up as i go most of these things are something most of these things are already being researched upon and you'll see that this is essentially what a biomedical engineer would be involved with and i guess like now is a good time to point out that the cool thing that i like about biomedical engineering is say you've completed your undergraduate in something like electronics or mechanical engineering you can still pursue a career in biomedical engineering because you can take that as a master's level course and use all that knowledge from your undergraduate degree electronics mechanics computer even and apply that into healthcare so these are just like two disciplines that just nicely fit together biomedical engineering goes well with any other field and that knowledge and and that intellectual knowledge that you've gained through years of studying does not go waste the fact that this field has direct positive impact on human health is one of the reasons why i feel it's really satisfying to work in this as a career the other thing is if you're someone who really enjoys multitasking this is definitely for you you're always like learning multiple things like think about it in order to learn biomechanics you first have to learn mechanics and then you can see how you you know your body will react to all of these different things so you're basically learning a little bit of everything and then trying to apply it to the best possible way to the human body and here's the thing you know nobody knows from the start of their undergraduate degree or high school or even the end of their undergraduate degree with what they want to pursue as a career and i feel like there's a lot of pressure on us from the very beginning you know what do you want to do do you have it all figured out and when i was an undergraduate degree i was so sure that you know the thing that i would like to do and the thing that would be really cool would be to design artificial organs and go into orthopedics so that was my entire focus and i had so many projects revolving around that a prime example was the prosthetic arm that i built to um suppress hand tremors um but as i moved on into my third and my fourth year i was exposed to this area of microfluidics and something called the lab on ship technology at harvard and i thought that was really cool so my interest like changed from that and now i wanted to do this that stuck along for some more time and by the time i finished my undergrad i felt like i wasn't done i wanted to know more about this field that i kind of like left midway that led me to doing my masters in cornell university i continue to apply and learn more about how i can you know use my skills to develop this field of microfluidics and eventually that stuck around even further and now i'm in a job which is basically lab on chip and microfluidics and i absolutely love it i've gotten a paper published in a really high impact journal when i was at harvard medical school and this has just been all such a fulfilling right to just do so many different things so my point here by telling you guys all this is that it's okay if you don't know or you don't have it figured out but you just know some pieces of it you know yeah i think this is something i want to do it might be fun to try out that's all the push and that's all the motivation that you need if you think you might be interested the only way to be sure and to be firm on that decision is to try it out that's all i'm gonna say it's okay to make mistakes it's okay to fail but just make sure that whatever you pick you're putting your 100 effort in um in making yourself better at that craft okay so that's a lot of motivation and inspiration talk let's come down to the important stuff numbers how much can you actually make with this biomedical engineering degree and what does your career look like now come on spoiler alert i bought a mercedes at 26. so i'm just gonna put it out there that it's a very promising career finance wise and you're not going to fall short or regret this in terms of being financially independent now according to the u.s department of labor the mean salary for a biomedical engineer revolves somewhere around 95 000 per year with the top 15 percent earning about 150 000 per year now i just want to point out that this whole category is very very elaborate because this involves fresh graduates as well as people who've had years and years of experience so that's like a good range to have in mind when you're thinking of you know pursuing this degree now economically speaking let's treat this entire field like it's on the stock market the diagnostic industry is currently tripling every year which means that they're going to be more jobs they're going to be more higher paying jobs and the advancements that we make like i mentioned before by using the expertise of chemistry physics mechanical engineering ai the more and more we get all of this into healthcare this area is just going to blow up so yeah there you have it i think that is my quick synopsis and take on biomedical engineering what it's all about so at this point let's go ahead and do the giveaway question um comment down below crazy medusa what's your area of interest now hold on before you answer i don't want any of those cliche answers that i want to become an engineer a doctor a lawyer come on i want specific answers of what exactly you want to do your area of interest is not what a degree name is your area of interest is what impact you want to have on the society and in the community i hope that this video inspired you a little bit motivated you or even just provided basically a slightest bit of reassurance and information with what biomedical engineering is all about if you have any other questions that i probably didn't go over in this video about this field feel free to drop them in the comment below i go through all of them and i'll try my best to give you guys an appropriate answer but until then stay safe if you haven't watched my last video come on it's the mercedes pickup vlog watch that right over here or if you want to go ahead and watch a different playlist you can do so right over here but i'll see you guys in the next one take care bye