I graduated in Electrical and Computer Engineering last year. I went down the software route because it was less difficult and because of pay. Last night I talked with this guy yesterday at a party about organoids, movie reconstruction from brain activity (deep neural networks), and brain neurons in a dish playing the game Pong and we just completely disregarded the music and dancing at the party. The last time I was this excited about science and engineering was back when Apple came with their M1 chip to rival AMD, Arm, and Intel. Now I’m considering going back to school for a technical masters and working with the tech transfer office, but I’m worried about money and being pigeonholed into one domain. What’s it like working with a technical masters that’s in a domain different than your bachelor (like biomedical)? What career paths are there? #engineering #software #swe
My backgrounds in biochemistry and I’ve been looking into something similar. There are companies that pay well (DE Shaw Research for example) but I have decided I want to invest in my SWE skills and those best practices (esp given my background isn’t CS) because it leads to more opportunities. But I’d love to work for one of those crispr biotech startups, they just don’t have many or any roles for SWEs yet. I did see an automation engineer role at a longevity company- maybe retro but they’re too early stage for me (stage was fine but they were very disorganized lol… happy to expand on that but this comment is already long af)
Just to make sure I understand correctly, your undergrad was computer and electrical eng, and you want to do a graduate degree in biomedical engineering? It seems feasible. Hopefully you took some bio classes as an undergrad. If not, i assume youd just have to take some catch-up courses first. You could also go to medical school. I've worked with many software eng who did an MD. Kinda depends on your interests and finances. You could also probably just go get a software development role in some kind of bio bioinformatics startup or whatever and learn on the job. One of the great things about being a swe is its so easy to change industries. Every industry needs swe. Someone recommended omscs, but that's another cs degree, AFAIK not biomedical.
Many big science institutes and university labs hire computer scientists or research engineers, you can look into those roles, I think that's the closest to swe with science as it gets. Especially those that get big government grants which might require more manpower than just graduate students. Idk anything about bioengineering though, just CS science.
If you want to keep working meanwhile going to school, I recommend Georgia Tech OMSCS. Most likely you will get in since you have an engineering degree. The courses will do the work on weeding out students as they are tough for ML and Computer Systems specialization. The price and quality of education is above par.
Just looked at their website and it looks insane! Thank you