What is the day in the life of a biomedical engineer?

Dear Mirna,
First, congratulations on ambitions to become an Aggie! It's a great school and I wish you the best.

With regards to your question, there is, as you can imagine, quite a bit of variability as far as experience goes, depending on whether you work in a hospital system, directly with clinicians, or in the R&D field. My work has personally been in the latter, where I was working in an Orthopaedic Biomechanics Lab. Like many engineering careers, it involves a lot of work on the computer, as background research, planning, and analysis will take up the bulk of your time. Persistence is key during these times, and you want to stick to meeting your goals and being vigilant. You want to do your best to answer anticipate any possible challenges and problems before you get to testing, prototyping, development, etc.

Of course, there is a lot of satisfaction that comes from working in this field. Solving a problem, publishing a paper, making a contribution to a design is all greatly satisfying, and likely is the fuel to keep you engaged and going in this field. Just keep in mind that it'll never be quite a smooth or quick as you'd like, and that there will be a lot of frustration, but at the end it can be the ultimate feeling of pride to make, do, or find something novel in your field.

If you're interested in clinical aspects of biomedical-engineering, feel free to check out Materialise's youtube page. They have biomedical engineers that work in the field with physicians directly. A great example is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wSbpihSgO4

Again, best of luck, and glad you're going to be an Aggie!

Andy Cabezas