Wanted/Found: Balancing Needs and Discovery in Biomedical Engineering Education

The ivory tower metaphor for academia’s distance from practical society was originally a description, not of a university building, but of a beautiful neck. The phrase, a symbol of noble purity, is traced to the Bible’s Song of Solomon. By the 19th century, the phrase pointed to the place that detached dreamers (writers, philosophers, and scientists) holed up to pursue intellectual work. Along the way, the metaphor also gravitated to literal associations with the towers of university campuses (perhaps best epitomized in the two creamy-white towers of All Souls College, the only ‘pure research college’ at Oxford University).

Such delicate towers of pure research are increasingly a figment of institutional memory – the figurative terrain of higher education is no longer dominated by these lofty symbols of intellectual labor, hovering at a remove from the grounded, practical problems of society. “The landscape has changed,” observes Phil Weilerstein, executive director of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA). “There’s a growing pressure on the university to not just be a source of discoveries in science but also to be a font of innovation to address the needs of society.” Broadly speaking, engineering has arguably always been an academic discipline with a foot on the ground, primed to touch down in concrete terms. Nonetheless, a shift in mindset over the recent decades has been necessary to get from the engineer’s textbook, laboratory, and notebook to the ‘needs of society.’ Biomedical engineering (BME), specifically, is seen by many as especially well suited to meet this challenge, both because of its interdisciplinary nature and because, as a relatively new academic discipline, it has the potential to define itself around this people-oriented focus, without having to slough off decades-old tradition and structures that might be otherwise oriented. The question as to how BME is positioning itself to address these needs is perhaps best answered by looking at several predominant trends and efforts in BME education nationally. This article provides an overview of these, which include shaping instruction around a ‘challenge-based’ approach to learning; a move toward approaching problem solving with a global society in mind; increasing entrepreneurial training for BME students; and allowing interdisciplinary work between BME and other fields to be not just an option, but in some programs, a defining characteristic.

In a challenge-based approach, this model is reordered. The instructor leads with a ‘challenge’ – a question – rather than a lecture, asking students, for example: how should we build an artificial heart? The students are then expected to react to that challenge with their current knowledge – to respond ‘ahead of time,’ likely before they have all the necessary knowledge. Students’ initial response is used as the jump-off point for presenting new subject matter and materials. Variations on this challenge-based approach have taken root, not just in BME classrooms around the country, but in programs that BME departments offer to students as part of their curriculum.

The full article discusses the importance of factors such as:

• Global Problem Solving
• Engineers as Entrepreneurs
• Clinical Immersion
• Degrees of (Inter)Disciplinarity

While all signs point to the notion that today, more than a decade ago, BME students exit their undergraduate and graduate programs with a broader panoply of skills to ease their entry into industry jobs, the question lingers: are they therefore more easily getting jobs with their degrees than they did ten years ago? To answer this question, we spoke with Charla Triplett, founder and president of the Biomedical Engineering Career Alliance (BCA), an organization focused on advocating BME degrees to industry (Figure 5). The nonprofit holds career conferences that bring together potential employers and BME job seekers – an equal mix of undergraduate and graduate students at various stages in their degree work – about half of whom are actively seeking jobs. Triplett says that many students emerge from academia focused mainly on getting research and development jobs, not being aware of the other roles they can play in companies – working as clinical engineers or in quality, for example. Her point underscores the fact that an education in BME should include students learning what their range of career options are so that they in turn can help to educate industry in the unique sets of skills that they can bring to companies. “Industry may know of the discipline,” says Triplett, “but not necessarily of the skills that come with it.”

Prof. Eisenberg at BU agrees that BME graduates have to “work a little harder [to obtain jobs] than [students in] other more traditional disciplines [that are] a 100 years old” – disciplines such as electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineering. Currently, a fair number of BME graduates will take what Eisenberg calls transitional jobs for a year or two before heading to graduate school or obtaining positions in their desired BME career trajectory. Triplett, meanwhile, has witnessed a shift in industry awareness of the skills that BME can bring to industry. Where companies have traditionally looked to hire basic scientists or chemical engineers, they are now in some sectors realizing that biomedical engineers bring with them a quantitative and problemsolving skill set that basic scientists may not have – or, says Triplett, they may have the “biology knowledge that a chemical engineer might not have.” Triplett founded BCA a little more than ten years ago, and in that time frame she has watched as medical device companies came to this realization. Now, they are one of the main recruiters of BMEs. That said, biotech and pharmaceutical companies have roles that would be a good fit for BME graduates, but they need more awareness of that match and “there’s still a lot of room for growth,” Triplett feels. Still, there has been a palpable shift. When Triplett founded the BCA, she recalls, “It used to be that you would never see the words ‘biomedical engineer’ in a job description anywhere. I would have to explain over and over again what BME was … and that is not the same today and that is exciting.”

Sarah Campbell is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York.

To find out more about this topic, read the complete article, from the IEEE Pulse Magazine, July/August 2011