best bioE,bme?: duke hopkins cornell mit uc-berk

[bsteves4]

just curious as to what people thought.. about various top bio/biomedical eng programs

which do you think is better a program with a strong focus on medicine, and great ties to (top) medical schools, but not quite top notch basic engineering program (i.e. duke, hopkins)

or

programs founded in hardcore top-notch engineering programs, but not as well tied to medicine, or with a medical school on campus.. i.e. the other 3 listed

i know ill probably get some biased responses,but oh well

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[macktong]

just curious as to what people thought.. about various top bio/biomedical eng programs

which do you think is better a program with a strong focus on medicine, and great ties to (top) medical schools, but not quite top notch basic engineering program (i.e. duke, hopkins)

or

programs founded in hardcore top-notch engineering programs, but not as well tied to medicine, or with a medical school on campus.. i.e. the other 3 listed

i know ill probably get some biased responses,but oh well

I think HST is one of the best biomed programs. You can get the best of both world... engineering training at MIT and medical training at HMS.

 

[tinkerbelle]

I was a Hopkins BME, and I thought it was an awesome program. Although, I would have liked more bio... I thought our BME program was very engineering/EE oriented. But honestly, I don't think it matters where you go. Hopkins, Duke, and MIT are all good. So are the UC's i think. I've never heard anything about the Cornell BME program. But since you are pre-med, it would be nice to go to a school with connections to a top notch hosptial/med school... just because you might have better opportunites to do biomedical research.

 

[Sunflower189]

MIT's formal requirements in the BE major are not geared to medicine, true. It's also a very new program (just made officially available to 20 students in Class of '08). But it's also not an appendage to some engineering department (though such programs exist here, and almost every engineering dept. has a bio option). I'd call it Quantitative Biology.

MIT does have a very strong relationship with Harvard Medical. There is an obscene amount of mouthwatering biomedical classes offered among their multiple joint programs - you just don't have them as major requirements. I took a class at Harvard Med last term, and it was an awesome experience (though humbling - those guys munched the curve bigtime). Might take a summer research job there too.

Hopkins and Duke have actual BME programs, and good ones. What kept me from going there was realizing that they don't have comparable strength in the surrounding departments. Drop/get weeded/lose interest in BME, and your fallback plans have mediocre reps at best. Duke is also very much an engineering program, so you have to want that. And Hopkins doesn't have a rep for screw-your-neighbor premeds for nothing. (I applied to Hopkins though, and would've applied to Duke if I could've tolerated the culture.)

</ end biased $0.02 from MIT '08 premed engineer>

 

[xadmin]

UCSD BioMed Program = Best in the country. Check USNEWs BioTechnology.

 

[tinkerbelle]

And Hopkins doesn't have a rep for screw-your-neighbor premeds for nothing.

You just gotta figure out who the cut throats are and stay faaar away from them. Hopkins isn't too bad though. I don't know why we have such a bad reputation. A lot of us try to be helpful and share whatever resources we have.

 

[tinkerbelle]

UCSD BioMed Program = Best in the country. Check USNEWs BioTechnology.

Not true. Hopkins is always #1. Duke is second and UCSD is third.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/engineering/phd/enps02_brief.php

 

[xadmin]

Not true. Hopkins is always #1. Duke is second and UCSD is third.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/engineering/phd/enps02_brief.php

Oh yeah. My bad.

 

[PublicEnemy]

Northwestern University has a good BME program as well. I always knock it here on SDN fpr how hard it was, but its amongst the best. They have several different tracks or concentrations within BME, which not all schools offer, their tracks include biotechnology, biomechanics, bioinformatics, compsci, medical techonology/instrumentation, biomaterials/polymers. they have a bunch of others, so you can really learn the area that interests you in addition to the general BME curriculum. That was one of the reasons I choose NU over other good places like Duke and Penn.

The other nice thing about Northwestern is that their BME program is highly ranked, their overall engineering school is highly ranked, and their overall undergraduate is highly ranked. This speaks to the strength of the overall engineering curriculum and not just BME, which is something important to consider as well, and I liked the way at NU you received a comprehensive general engineering background from the first day of classes. Aside from Kellog, the school of management, they're never #1 or at the very top of any the categories, but they're always right up there and very well ranked in everything, every major engineering category, almost every category in arts and sciences, graduate and professional school, business school, med school, law school, journalism etc. That was the other reason I chose NU, because of the opportunities, and everything else that was there in case I changed my mind or wanted to do something in addition.

 

[frantic983]

.

 

[Stanford_Playah]

Not true. Hopkins is always #1. Duke is second and UCSD is third.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/engineering/phd/enps02_brief.php

I'd also say that UCSD is the best overall if you actually ranked by the quality of the biomedical engineering research going on at all of the aforementioned schools, as opposed to putting random weights on random factors, as US News does in their rankings. UCSD (as does UC Berkeley) has a much better engineering school than Hopkins, so I think they hold a slight advantage for this reason. Stanford also has a better engineering program than Hopkins, and they're just starting to have more collaborate efforts between the schools of engineering and medicine. I bet the US News rankings will change dramatically pretty soon once biomedical engineering becomes more established and a lot more schools start officially recognizing it as a department of its own.

 

[virilep]

alright, I don't wanna even mention Vanderbilt in this. It's not the best program, but it can hold it's own. Our program director is the Chairman of VaNTH. if you guys have heard of that. It's a deal between Vanderbilt Northwestern, UT Texas (I think), and Harvard. anyhow.. yeah, we can hold our own.