I wasted a whole semester. I found out too late that I didn’t want to be a doctor, and I wasted a semester in a major that I didn’t want. To me, my major switch after the first semester of my junior year seems like a huge waste of time, but I did learn from it. I’ve always been interested in medicine. I know that I have a place in medicine, but I’ve learned two things now: I don’t want to be a doctor and I also don’t want to be a biomedical engineer. At least I don’t want to be a biomedical engineering major at Penn State. Let me explain what I mean.
Penn State’s undergraduate biomedical engineering program is a high-competition, fast-paced, poorly structured program. After seeing two sides of the coin, this is my opinion. It does not have to apply to anyone besides me, but here is what I’ve seen. Biomedical engineering at Penn State breaks people in the way that you think of typical engineering. You’ve heard this before, “look to your left, look to your right, one of you will not be here after four years”. Let me be clear. This strategy for teaching engineering was ruled out years ago as the standard. It is now seen as inhumane and wrong because it doesn’t encourage the future of engineers. It beats them down and teaches the vast majority of students that they are worthless. Not only this, but it encourages unhealthy habits and unhealthy competition. One example of this that exists in the BME department is BME 409. The class is known to be the hardest BME course that exists. Some highlights: homeworks take about 15 pages to complete (homework is weekly, sometimes twice in a week), exam averages are in the 40s. Luckily, students often schedule coursework around this class, but this doesn’t change the fact that it’s obscene for one class to take so much time. I’ve seen many of my friends go through many sleepless nights so that they can complete their assignments for this class. Lack of sleep influences your ability to learn (well studied). If we are encouraging learning at the university, then why are we encouraging a class that is so well known for causing sleep deprivation and stress?
This is not my only complaint about the undergraduate biomedical engineering program at Penn State. Over my 2.5 years in the department, I found the faculty and staff (with the exception of people I worked closely with) to be very unaccommodating. There are exceptions to this rule as well. I didn’t know this was the case until I switched to Engineering Science and saw how much faculty and staff care about the students. Administration in Engineering Science was extremely attentive to the struggles and successes of their undergraduate students. Undergraduate students are expected and encouraged to perform outside of the classroom, and they have a host of opportunities thrown at them. Engineering science are mentored as needed and accommodated in ways that are fair. I did not see much of this in biomedical engineering. Maybe it is a lack of funding or a lack of leadership, but the program is not nearly as cohesive as engineering science’s program.
I learned a lot about the differences between well-run departments vs. departments that are not so well run. And I learned a lot about how I respond to stress and how I respond to circumstances that don’t agree with me. I don’t want to be stuck in a situation where I am unhappy for long periods of time. And I don’t want to be stuck in a situation where I don’t have a personal investment in the outcome. I love my current degree because I’ve learned how to define a problem using several different areas of expertise and I have a handle on a variety of engineering problems.
Because of my involvement in the BME department, I know myself better and I know my likes and dislikes. I like a competitive environment (I’ve grown up in a competitive environment my whole life), but not one that is too competitive. I like a collaborative environment much better than a competitive environment. I tend to create a mini-collaborative environment wherever I go, and it is an aspect of my personality that I have been working on so I can be even better at creating collaborative environments for learning. For example, I have some trouble with the math in my machine learning and artificial intelligence class, but my classmate is very good at it. I am very good at finding the applications from concepts and thinking outside of the box and having good grasp of the concepts. My classmate needs help in these areas. In other words, we make a great team and we teach each other concepts from various perspectives so that we both have a solid understanding of the course material.
Since my BME experience, I’ve made it a point to do things that interest me and make me happy. I’m pursuing my interests in data analysis, healthcare, and startups simultaneous and I have time to (since I don’t have to have my nose buried in the books 100% of the time to compete with my peers). It’s a happy medium and I’m still able to be successful without compromising my happiness or my interests. Don’t get me wrong. My major is not easy. I work hard in classes. Hours per week. Many, many hours. But there’s a big difference between 40-60 hours of classwork and 70-90 hours. I want to have time for other things during my day. Learning does not stop when classwork stops and I daresay that I learn more outside class than within.
I see my time in Penn State’s biomedical engineering department as a waste of time, but it’s more than that. I learned about what kinds of environments I like and those that I don’t like. I learned how my body and brain respond to situations I don’t like and I learned how to remove myself from a situation that I don’t like. There are many reasons why biomedical engineering was not the right decision for me and there may be many people for which biomedical engineering is the right decision. I still think there are many improvements to be made in BME, but more than anything, it was not a good fit for me.
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