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Session 2309

Biomedical Engineering Masters Degree Coupled with a Graduate Level Minor in Business Administration

David S. Lalush, Tiffany Harris, Timothy A. Johnson, Stephen B. Knisley, and Stephen R. Quint

Department of Biomedical Engineering, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract The Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), in close association with the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC- CH, has developed a graduate minor in Business Administration which is awarded with the M.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering. Participating students are required to take three specific business courses through the Business School in order to meet the Graduate School requirements for an official minor. These courses, selected by faculty from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Business School, include Operations Management, Organizational Behavior, and Marketing. Students have the option of making the program a formal minor, with official recognition on their graduate transcript, or an informal minor. The formal minor requires students to take the three courses in addition to the 31 credits required for the M.S. degree in BME; the informal minor allows the students to take the three business courses as free electives within the established structure of our M.S. degree program. Our first students are currently completing the program and found it to be challenging and rewarding. The program will continue to leverage the resources of the internationally-renowned Kenan-Flagler Business School with the research and education missions of the School of Medicine to prepare select students for leadership roles in the private-sector as biomedical engineers.

Introduction No other field in engineering is experiencing the explosive growth currently enjoyed by Biomedical Engineering. While this discipline has always encompassed an extraordinary breadth of direction, the recent advances in cell and tissue engineering, genomics, and nanotechnology have greatly expanded the business potential for commercially applying the innovations introduced by this technology-based discipline. Thus, many BME students are attracted by the entrepreneurial potential of the field. Also, most students graduating with the M.S. degree are employed in industry and would benefit from training in business practices and the business environment [1].

In the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), annual student surveys frequently requested more exposure to the BME industrial sector. In a 1998 survey in our department, only about half of the students entering our graduate program had taken an introductory course in economics in their undergraduate programs. Further, almost none of the students had taken courses in business beyond

Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education

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Quint, S. (2003, June), Biomedical Engineering Master's Degree Coupled With A Graduate Level Minor In Business Administration Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--12169