Teach me: Bio-engineering

I am currently an engineer working at a rather large company in the gas turbine business. This company is very large, and paid no taxes last year. I am starting to realize that I don't like big companies very much, and my job satisfaction is very low. Not too much complaining, the pay is adequate, the terms reasonable, the health insurance normal and the security very good.

That being said, I'd like to think elsewhere. This job is all about piping, project management, gas flow schematics, bleh. Boring. I caught my mind drifting a few days back (It's hard to catch up with sometimes) and it was thinking about my crappy knees. I then got to thinking about all of the cool stuff people are doing with implants these days. Let me try that again... Bone/joint/ligament type implants sound very interesting to me. I would love researching different materials and designing new methods of attaching and creating such things.

I have undergrad degrees in both mechanical engineering and applied physics.

What do I have to do to jump into this sort of thing? Any places which I can research? Looking not to relocate, currently in Greenville SC.

What say the masses?

I'm a Bioengineer and I totally agree with you on the subject of big companies and social responsibility. I'm happiest when working at an early stage medical device start-up -where most of the interesting new devices get developed. In the big medical device companies (Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Abbott etc.) there is a lot of bureaucracy and things just move too slowly.

In general, you should be able to get a job at a medical device company without any specific "bionengineering" experience. Many of the guys I work with started out in other engineering fields.

I would start researching companies here: http://www.mddionline.com/ and here: http://www.devicespace.com/ Devicespace even has a job board but I haven't used it myself so I can't vouch for it.

Otherwise, if you do decide to go back to school, your best bet would be either a Bioengineering Masters degree or a Biodesign Fellowship. For the Masters degrees you can just look at US News and World Report for comparisons, for the felllowships, I would start at this website: http://www.biodesignfellowship.com It was made by a friend of mine and it is the only collection of information on these fellowships since they are relatively new.

I think your biggest problem is likely to be the desire to not relocate. Medical Device companies and especially start-ups are concentrated in Northern California with a significantly smaller number in SoCal, Boston, Texas and Minnesota.

PM me if you have any specific questions. I'm in Northern California myself and can put you in touch with a lot of people or send your resume around if you decide you want a job around here.

Tuna, there isn't much, Im afraid, in the Greenville area for that sort of thing. Biological related research has few companies in SC but there are quite a few in RTP in NC. I was seriously considering going back to school and getting my doctorate in Bioengineering from Clemson a few years ago. Several of the faculty at Clemson are industry leaders in their field and some pretty amazing discoveries have come out of there in the past couple of years.

Should you decide to change careers, good luck to you! Bioengineering is a fascinating field and (I believe) its going to be the next big thing.

I worked for one downstate. I did research on bone scaffolding and the bioabsorbable polymers it's made from. A lot of the local companies have R&D that works on medical products and does small specialty runs; it wouldn't hurt to check it out. Poly-Med comes to mind, but I doubt they're hiring.

Your degree and experience will help you with jobs on the manufacturing side of things, but you'd be lucky to start out as much more than a gofer on the research side of things. You'd basically end up doing a lot of testing and such without much at all in the way of input.

There's a lot of documentation and re-documentation and re-documentation and writing stuff down and keeping notebooks and getting your boss to check your notebook and following ASTM's to the letter. You're making stuff that the FDA, etc has to check out. You're making things that your company can get its ass sued off for if something goes wrong with a product.

What I'm saying is that you will be trading one mind-numbing experience for another.

I would tell you to get into a program at Clemson, but if I remember correctly, you have a family and can't go back to school.

I've got some knives and some bright lights. Lets get started.