If so, would you mind giving a rundown on what your job is like? I mentioned in a previous post, I am a current radiology student having trouble finding a school that will let me take the technical portion due to vaccine mandates. A teacher told me I have a really good engineering mindset. I previously had considered engineering, but was turned off due to the large amount of desk work engineering requires. He told me biomedical engineering would be more hands-on, plus my health related classes would transfer to it. Is this true?
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I worked with some biomedical engineers in medical device R&D, and they tended to be Systems Engineers. That means they were responsible for defining the high-level functional, performance, quality, reliability, safety, etc... requirements at the system level and perhaps do some of the system decomposition (eg. determining if something is performed in software or using an electronic circuit). This involves some hands-on experimentation at the beginning of the project but transitions to a lot of requirement and documentation writing (someone else also mentioned writing a lot of documentation: notice a pattern?).
Most of the good Systems Engineers I've worked with have prior work experience in a specialized engineering field (mechanical, electrical, software, quality, etc...). One of the biomed guys I used to work with had previous experience as a Quality Engineer who did failure analysis of some sort of implantable medical device.
Since you mentioned not liking "desk work" I'll say that in if you're doing product R&D there are two phases of the product development lifecycle that are actually fun:
The rest of it for the most part is banging everything together until it works, drudgery, and paperwork. Not a hard and fast rule since you will run into problems you have to solve later on in the lifecycle, but you'll be a lot more constrained by other non-negotiable design decisions; so they usually won't be as fun to solve. Everyone has to decide if the fun (or the money) makes up for the bullshit.