What do engineers do in medical school?

[akhan217]

I have heard that some people come to medical school with engineering degrees.
Would their engineering degrees be particularly useful and what fields would they work in?
Thanks

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[DrMidlife]

An engineering degree is useful if you got A's in physics and learned how to be a good student. Otherwise the study of engineering is not particularly useful in medical training compared to any other major.

By comparison, experience working as an engineer in practice is useful in that you come into medicine with the ability to think about systems and processes and risks and points of failure because you did that for a living. There's a shortage of doctors who give a crap about systems and processes (which shows, badly). But systems thinking is actually a detriment to medical training because it impedes your ability to memorize endless, endless facts for the first two years of med school. Points of interest within systems and processes are pure distractions, with few exceptions, until late in residency.

That said, if you went into engineering because you want to know how things work, then this is handy during preclinical years. You will have a whole bunch of classmates who remember things by pure rote memory, or in some cases a photographic memory. In my experience it's a huge benefit for me to be able to think my way to an answer on an exam or when pimped, but as above, this is a more time consuming method to learn material than rote memorization.

You can always find a research project where your particular discipline is handy, such as studying bone strength or quality metrics or EMR deployment.

After residency (7+ years after starting med school) you might find you're still interested in engineery things, and then there are plenty of options in and out of clinical practice. Device development, EMR adoption/consulting, standards committees, space planning, QI, etc.

Bets of luck to you.

 

[ChE04]

Anesthesia baby!!

 

[akhan217]

That would be the main thing for me. Right now I'm majoring in BME and was focused on minoring in another engineering field such as chemical eng. (too much ap credit).. I would think that that relates most directly to cardiology, but if I go to medical school, I'm not sure if I would be able to use any of these principles in clinical practice. When you said "join a research project", does that mean something like a fellowship? And what options would there be for my particular path that I have chosen?

 

[DrMidlife]

That would be the main thing for me.

Not a helpful opening pronoun.

Let go of needing to "use" the principles you're learning in your undergrad major. That's about #57 on the list of things you should be thinking about, in deciding to go to medical school or not.

Undergrad coursework isn't going to have any impact on your choice of specialty. The things you do outside the classroom might have an impact on your medical training and/or career.

If you want to know what biomed engineers do in cardiology, find some cardio biomed engineers, ask questions, try to get a gig. Doing a fellowship is what people do when they have value to provide, which you don't have. As an undergrad/premed you don't have value: you have potential. This means you go volunteer with any lab or clinic that will give you an opportunity that looks interesting. How to find those opportunities? Look for them.

This isn't a non-traditional situation. You aren't majoring in bio, but other than that you're a typical premed, trying to figure out how to med school. This forum is useful if you're raising a family, paying a mortgage, trying to decide whether to leave a six figure career for a medical career. You'll get great advice in pre-allo.

And that advice will boil down to this: go get real experience in real clinical settings with real doctors and maybe some biomed engineers. Volunteer. Observe. Absorb. Get exposed to the practice of medicine and the practice of research. See who works in operating rooms. See who works in nuclear physics. See who carries a toolbelt. See who is sought out for emergent or non-emergent advice. Get in there or this is all just a career fantasy.

Best of luck to you.

 

[MetalloBetalactamase]

Oh I know! Study medicine. Hahaha.....(not helpful, but that is what everybody in my med school does.)

 

[Mad Jack]

An engineering degree is useful if you got A's in physics and learned how to be a good student. Otherwise the study of engineering is not particularly useful in medical training compared to any other major.

By comparison, experience working as an engineer in practice is useful in that you come into medicine with the ability to think about systems and processes and risks and points of failure because you did that for a living. There's a shortage of doctors who give a crap about systems and processes (which shows, badly). But systems thinking is actually a detriment to medical training because it impedes your ability to memorize endless, endless facts for the first two years of med school. Points of interest within systems and processes are pure distractions, with few exceptions, until late in residency.

That said, if you went into engineering because you want to know how things work, then this is handy during preclinical years. You will have a whole bunch of classmates who remember things by pure rote memory, or in some cases a photographic memory. In my experience it's a huge benefit for me to be able to think my way to an answer on an exam or when pimped, but as above, this is a more time consuming method to learn material than rote memorization.

You can always find a research project where your particular discipline is handy, such as studying bone strength or quality metrics or EMR deployment.

After residency (7+ years after starting med school) you might find you're still interested in engineery things, and then there are plenty of options in and out of clinical practice. Device development, EMR adoption/consulting, standards committees, space planning, QI, etc.

Bets of luck to you.

Oh my god. Your post made so many of the scuffles I've had with attendings make sense. I've always approached things from my techie background, trying to look at each piece of the puzzle when something went or was going wrong, while attendings would frequently ignore the pieces and just ascribe what was happening to the most likely thing that they could come up with from there experience, often disregarding major pieces of the picture in front of them. It's quite frustrating, as some things should be painfully obvious.

I had a patient that was, for instance, jolting from pain after open heart surgery. Each time they delivered a breath, he would be in visible, excruciating pain. The trouble is, they were ventilating him with 14cc/kilo tidal volumes, which are large breaths for anyone, let alone a guy who had just had his rib cage cracked open. They ignored my thought that maybe, just maybe, stretching a guy's chest to its limit might be a bad idea and ascribed it to standard post-op pain. They failed to see the connection of massive tidal volumes in a recently cracked chest causing more more pain than normal (10cc/kilo) tidal volumes. Sure enough, pain medication wasn't enough and the guy needed his volumes to be dropped so he stopped feeling like his chest was being ripped open from the inside Alien-style every time the vent delivered a breath before we were able to wean him.

To me, this was a simple flow chart of what is his problem, when does it occur, what are we doing that makes him different than other patients with the same condition, how can we resolve the problem. The attending just seemed to jump to what the most common answers were without doing point by point thinking- it was just "I cut him open, he is clearly in pain, give him pain meds" with no examination of the many things occurring between the surgery and his response, no analysis of each but of the chain along the way and what could be optimized.

The engineering mindset can be an advantage in certain fields, for sure. Just be aware that your focus in the minutiae might not be as appreciated as you would hope, at least until you are running the show. Process improvement, biotech, management, and even clinical care can benefit from the way you approach problems.

 

[DrMidlife]

Just be aware that your focus in the minutiae might not be as appreciated as you would hope, at least until you are running the show. Process improvement, biotech, management, and even clinical care can benefit from the way you approach problems.

Exactly.

The best advice I can give to an engineery-processy-systemsy-actually-quite-competent new med student (note: holding a degree in any major says NOTHING about competence!) is to keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and just hold on until you're past intern year. Find engineery friends outside med school, do some writing, just hang on. Even when an attending or other faculty member seems to be interested in your perspective or your input, they aren't. Not even a little bit. You are one fish in a stream of med students that never ends, and they invest in you accordingly. Year after year. The fish all look alike. One particularly clever fish goes by just as fast.

Save your competence for when you can actually use it - when you're licensed.

 

[akhan217]

Thanks for your replies

 

[Goro]

IThey learn Medicine just like all their fellow students who were Bio, Chem, Math and English Drama and Art majors.

I haven't found my that my students benefitted in any way from an Engineering degree. In fact, it might be the opposite. I had one who was struggling, and kept saying, ad nauseum, "but as an engineer, I was trained to think this way..."

He finally shut up when my Pathologist colleague told him "your days as an engineer ended when you put on that white coat."

I have heard that some people come to medical school with engineering degrees.
Would their engineering degrees be particularly useful and what fields would they work in?
Thanks

 

[ChE04]

Oh my god. Your post made so many of the scuffles I've had with attendings make sense. I've always approached things from my techie background, trying to look at each piece of the puzzle when something went or was going wrong, while attendings would frequently ignore the pieces and just ascribe what was happening to the most likely thing that they could come up with from there experience, often disregarding major pieces of the picture in front of them. It's quite frustrating, as some things should be painfully obvious.

I had a patient that was, for instance, jolting from pain after open heart surgery. Each time they delivered a breath, he would be in visible, excruciating pain. The trouble is, they were ventilating him with 14cc/kilo tidal volumes, which are large breaths for anyone, let alone a guy who had just had his rib cage cracked open. They ignored my thought that maybe, just maybe, stretching a guy's chest to its limit might be a bad idea and ascribed it to standard post-op pain. They failed to see the connection of massive tidal volumes in a recently cracked chest causing more more pain than normal (10cc/kilo) tidal volumes. Sure enough, pain medication wasn't enough and the guy needed his volumes to be dropped so he stopped feeling like his chest was being ripped open from the inside Alien-style every time the vent delivered a breath before we were able to wean him.

To me, this was a simple flow chart of what is his problem, when does it occur, what are we doing that makes him different than other patients with the same condition, how can we resolve the problem. The attending just seemed to jump to what the most common answers were without doing point by point thinking- it was just "I cut him open, he is clearly in pain, give him pain meds" with no examination of the many things occurring between the surgery and his response, no analysis of each but of the chain along the way and what could be optimized.

The engineering mindset can be an advantage in certain fields, for sure. Just be aware that your focus in the minutiae might not be as appreciated as you would hope, at least until you are running the show. Process improvement, biotech, management, and even clinical care can benefit from the way you approach problems.

That just sounds like someone managing the vent who really shouldn't be managing a vent, as opposed to any particular way of thinking. 6-8cc/kg is gold standard in our ORs and in our ICUs. Caveat: if there is some extreme, refractory acidemia and RR is maxed out at 35 we will go up on Tv; but 14cc/kg seems pretty dang high...

 

[Shjanzey]

Starting second year soon and so far my engineering degree has helped me zero times. There really isn't any overlap, and sadly nobody gives a **** that you have this skillset nor are they excited to put those skills to use.

The one area where engineers have an advantage is being used to long hours of study or projects. I do my 12 hours every day in the library and feel satisfied at a job well done. My colleagues think I am a try hard, but I don't think they know it can be much worse.

I also tried to use my skills during summer research to upgrade the research statistics from an excel worksheet to using sas. Unfortunately the RA that made the template got her feelings hurt and refused to endorse my work. All of this just reinforces my professional experience that engineers are no longer respected as a profession, nor do the general public even understand what we are capable of.

As for me I will save these skills for when I am an attending and pull them back out when I am the one who sets the direction. Then things will only be limited by my imagination.

 

[akhan217]

Starting second year soon and so far my engineering degree has helped me zero times. There really isn't any overlap, and sadly nobody gives a **** that you have this skillset nor are they excited to put those skills to use.

What was your engineering degree and what are you planning to do in medical school?

 

[Shjanzey]

What was your engineering degree and what are you planning to do in medical school?

Electrical engineering and computer science.

I plan to study. I'll be doing step prep along side classes so I won't have much time for anything else

 

[DrMidlife]

what are you planning to do in medical school?

So you're still thinking different people get to do different things in med school based on their undergrad major? Is that it?

 

[drpetermiller]

I have been a practicing physician for 30 years and all you idiots talk is bull****. B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T. My engineering degree paved the way for revolution, REVOLUTION in the field of medicine at none other than JOHNS HOPKINS university, where none of you folks could even dream about going. My MD/PhD is the REASON that this university is the # 1 medical school in the US.

 

[akhan217]

So you're still thinking different people get to do different things in med school based on their undergrad major? Is that it?

I mean why would I want my four years in undergrad to be a complete waste of time?

 

[DrMidlife]

I mean why would I want my four years in undergrad to be a complete waste of time?

Waste of time from whose perspective?

Do you believe that your undergrad experience only has value if it's recognized by medical schools as having value?

Do you believe that what you learn in school is fully utilized in practice? That as an engineer you'd fully use your undergrad engineering class content?

Do you expect medical schools to customize medical education for math majors? Former lawyers?

Do you realize that you get no vote on this?

 

[DrMidlife]

Undergrad is where you learn how to learn. And then you spend the rest of your life learning new stuff. Which might include medicine.

 

[akhan217]

I understand what you are saying. But I still want to do something with this acquired knowledge. Such as join a research group as you said. Because I really love BME.

 

[akhan217]

Waste of time from whose perspective?

Do you believe that your undergrad experience only has value if it's recognized by medical schools as having value?

Do you believe that what you learn in school is fully utilized in practice? That as an engineer you'd fully use your undergrad engineering class content?

Do you expect medical schools to customize medical education for math majors? Former lawyers?

These are all very good points.

 

[shoal]

Graduated with a engineering degree in bme from a top 3 program and found it of no help during med school. Kt may have even caused me signifcant harm. The thought process is vastly different. I ended up completing residency in EM and quite happy thus far. Good luck

Sent from my LG-D801 using Tapatalk

 

[Engeniero89]

@akhan217, electrical engineering woohoo! Yeah man corporate life is relatively unexciting as an electrical engineer (you did CS also so major props), sure I manage multiple million dollar projects but I'm not really using my brain most of the time haha, its sad how process driven & inefficient everything is.

As for what engineers do in med school... Engineering taught me to be an exceptionally hard-working student because if I wasn't studying all the time, I would have failed at my top 3 engineering school. But I didn't! I graduated magna cum laude! Take that engineering!

For med school, I plan on studying and studying and studying, just like I did in engineering undergrad.

 

[Shjanzey]

Very helpful! With 5+ years of experience in engineering research working in the industry and with two graduate degrees in a core engineering discipline (unlike BME which, no offense meant, is a premed degree), I feel it is going to be significantly difficult to get the engineer out of me...I know I am going to have to put a lot of time during MS1,2. But I would rather be slow and think my way through things than memorize and vomit then forget (which I am not really good at anyway).
Fantasizing about how things could really be instead of how they currently are would be one way to keep that engineering spirit alive even if none of my medical colleagues care... it may even payoff in some way! Oh.. and I am going to hold on to my enginerd buddies tightly!

Sadly due to the nature of med school you will spend most of your time in the memorize vomit cycle. Time is a premium, and the volume of info is impressive

 

[akhan217]

Interesting. I still want to be able to do something with the degree after med school and residency. Do you guys have any plans?

 

[akhan217]

Also how did I get probationary status? What did I do or say?