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Placement of Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering Graduates Steven Schreiner Western New England College, Springfield Massachusetts

Abstract

This paper presents three years of data available from a survey of placement of bioengineering and biomedical engineering graduates. The source of the data is the annual Placement Survey of the Academic Council of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). This voluntary survey yields perhaps the most comprehensive understanding of immediate post-graduation activity for the field. This paper focuses on data for bachelor, master, and doctor-level graduates. Looking across the three years, the data appear consistent with no apparent major trends. The overall placement of bioengineering and biomedical engineering graduates has averaged 89% for the period with all three educational levels showing a slight upward trend; in the most recent survey (2004), each educational level had overall placements above 90%.

Introduction

Placement of biomedical engineering students after graduation is of great interest to the biomedical engineering education community. Each university and college has a unique experience and perspective of where biomedical engineers are placed. Some programs report a large proportion going on to medical school or graduate school while others report a majority going directly to industry. Perhaps for the first time in the history of the field, definitive data exists to characterize the placement of the majority of biomedical engineering graduates across the country.

The Academic Council of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has been conducting a placement survey of member institutions for several years and has recently begun to publish the results. In the past three years, the survey was successful in capturing the placement of a large cohort of graduates in the field: 1475 graduates in 2003-2004; 1334 graduates in the 2002-2003 academic year; and 808 graduates in the 2001-2002 academic year. As a result, this survey is potentially the most reliable instrument that exists to track the initial placement of graduates. Other placement and salary surveys often struggle with relatively small sample sizes. Perhaps the most comprehensive employment survey of the field of engineering is conducted by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and placed into the Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System (SESTAT) [1]. However, the NSF SESTAT data does not look explicitly at the question of initial placement at the time of graduation.

In this paper, overall trends in placement for bioengineering and biomedical engineering are examined. Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Schreiner, S. (2005, June), Placement Of Bioengineering And Biomedical Engineering Graduates Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15037