Search for: All records

Workshops hosted at recent Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) meetings have identified the leap from university to a career in industry to be a nation-wide challenge for Biomedical Engineering (BME) undergraduate programs and their alumni. While some strides are being made to better utilize industry feedback to steer the future of BME curricula, a more holistic understanding of the factors influencing engineering students’ career outcomes is desired. Here, we present an exploratory study analyzing the relationship between the factor of diversity (gender, ethnicity) and undergraduate engineering students’ workforce opportunities (co-op, internship, and full-time employment offers, starting salaries). Using data collected by our university’s Engineering Career Services, we will present gender and ethnicity-based analyses of workforce opportunities and career outcomes for BME students, compared to three other undergraduate engineering majors at our university. As often typical with other BME programs, the BME major at our university has the highest percentage of female and under-represented minority students (31.7% and 15.0%, respectively), compared to our college of engineering as a whole (22.5% and 6.5%, respectively). Identifying potential diversity- and major-based inequities could provide further insight for how to improve retention and maintain appropriate pathways into the engineering workforce.