So I'm finally in med school after 4 years of BME. I have to say I'm liking it overall. Sure there are a lot of challenges, but BME had them too. In Med school, things are usually difficult because you're given a laundry list of things to memorize and you may forget 1 small detail of that list. In BME, all the laundry lists are pretty much given to you, it's only difficult to USE that laundry list. Both programs have their challenges in that sense. Though after you memorize all those laundry lists, you do actually get to USE and apply the information in the real world. It's just too bad, it happens late in the game and in order to get there, you have to beat the first few levels of the game.
In all, I'm still an engineer at heart and will keep that same "black-box" approach to problem solving. I like math, building stuff, modifying it, breaking it, and just overall curiosity. Engineering was pretty much a no brainer for me to choose as a major. The problem is that all the cool things I liked in engineering, one needs a PhD to pursue. I could have gone that route and spent 7 years getting that PhD just to do research for a company that will most likely take another 10 years of experience to actually get a decent job. Though, I thought why not pursue the path of Medicine, which also takes around 7 years including residency in which I get a good job right off the bat and I still have the opportunity to do research. Engineers are lazy, that's why we invent stuff to make people's lives easier. Most engineers, if they pursued medicine, in my opinion, would make great doctors, but because of the laziness to memorize those "laundry lists", most don't. I can't say I was non-lazy either, I actually didn't decide I liked Medicine until I got into med school and started learning it, but I didn't hate Medicine before med school either, so I thought why not give it a shot and at the same time, help some patients along the way?
The only other sucky part about med school is not being able to have those conversations with other "engineers" about almost anything. You will get laughed at or scorned upon if you even show a slight interest in how something works in med school, so you gotta keep yourself incognito and just blend in, which sucks, but then when it's all over, you can have those conversations again.
Anyways, that's my story without all the rosy, mushy, flower stuff that people put in their entrance essay.
Doctors basically are masters at following intense, precise algorithms. I think robots, brought about by advances in cybernetics, should do this ultimately and human doctors should use their creative talents. If the fields do merge 100 years from now or maybe longer than that, doctors would emerge as premier biomedical engineers and vice versa.
Totally agree, I said something like this already in this thread very early on, but I think some doctors got offended. What I was trying to say was that I think doctors have a lot of creative talent and that the non-creative part can go to robots in the future.
