BME Career Exploration: Examining Students’ Career Perspectives

Determinants of Intra-major Specialization and Career Decisions Among Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Students

“…Although research has explored the factors influencing students' decisions to pursue BME as a major (e.g., [1][2][3]), limited work has investigated factors related to students' choice of specialization within the BME major. Moreover, while studies have examined how BME students describe their career interests and job prospects [1,16], as well as gender differences in career outcomes [17] to our knowledge, no research has examined how gender influences track choice. This study, informed by prior research on intra-major specialization and SCCT, examined the factors that BME students' report being influential to their intra-major specialization track selection, the outcome expectations that they associate with particular BME specialization tracks, and gender differences in these relationships.…”

“…While a sizable body of work has examined factors related to student choice of engineering in general, and BME in particular as a major [9][10][11][12][13][14][15], there is considerably less research about how students make decisions about intra-major specialization among engineering majors, and very limited research to our knowledge which focuses on the factors that influence intra-major specialization decisions for BME students (see [8]). Further, while some research has looked at how BME career interests and hurdles related to job and career prospects [1,16], no research of which we are aware has examined the relationship between BME intramajor specialization and career interests. Finally, while some studies have examined gender differences in career outcomes for BME students [17], to our knowledge, no studies have examined gender differences in BME students' intra-major specialization.…”