Historically, BME undergraduate programs have been designed to expose students to the broad spectrum of knowledge required to adequately address problems in engineering and medicine. While their resultant knowledge base has allowed for flexibility in the careers that undergraduate biomedical engineers can enter, many BME students also believe that the broad curriculum may lead them to be perceived by employers as underprepared to enter industry positions upon graduation. Recent studies have validated this concern as BME students report fewer co-op and industry internship placements pre-graduation, enter the job market with fewer available jobs seeking BME graduates, and receive lower average annual salaries than other engineering disciplines. However, despite the challenges, students continue to pursue and persist through BME undergraduate degrees. If the perception is that their options are limited in industry, it is important to identify and understand the careers that students view as interesting and choose to pursue. To explore what students perceived as possible for a career upon graduation, this longitudinal study examined changes in BME students’ career aspirations over time. Fourteen (14) undergraduate BME students were interviewed three times over the course of their third year at a large R1, public university. A qualitative, open-coding approach was used to look for patterns of change at the individual and group levels. Findings indicated that most participants’ initial view of possible careers in the field was narrow. Over the course of the study, changes in participants’ understanding of career possibilities were observed based on if they had already decided what career they wished to pursue or not. For those who had not decided on a career yet, concrete exposures to possible BME careers were important to students’ development of more optimistic BME career outlooks. Suggestions for future research to more broadly understand BME students’ career exploration is also presented.
Cassandra (Cassie) Jamison is an Assistant Professor in the Experiential Engineering Education Department at Rowan University (Glassboro, NJ). Her research interests focus on understanding and improving the learning that occurs in experiential, out-of-class activities for engineering students. Cassie previously received a B.A. in Engineering Sciences at Wartburg College (Waverly, IA) and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in BME from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI).
In February 2021 Dr. Huang-Saad joined the Bioengineering faculty at Northeastern University and became the Director
of Life Sciences and Engineering Programs at The Roux Institute (Portland, Maine). Dr. Huang-Saad has a fourteen-
year history of bringi
Shanna Daly is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has a B.E. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. Her research characterizes front-end design practices across the student to practitioner continuum and studies the impact of developed front-end design tools on design success.
Lisa Lattuca, Professor of Higher Education and member of the Core Faculty in the Engineering Education Research Program at the University of Michigan.
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