Shadowing Practice: What Is Biomedical Engineering? (Is A Biomedical Engineering Degree Worth It?) - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Is a biomedical engineering major or biomedical engineering degree worth it?
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That's what we're going to be talking about today and we are going to jump right into it.
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What the heck is biomedical engineering?
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So biomedical engineering is basically combining engineering with medical research and product development.
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And they do this in order to create new ways to treat and cure injuries and diseases.
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Now as somebody myself who works in healthcare, I think biomedical engineering is super cool.
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I think it would be really cool to be a cyborg that's half machine and half human.
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And so I hope that biomedical engineering blows up and we're able to integrate technology and machines into the body.
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Okay, I'm kidding.
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I'm kidding.
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I don't want to actually be a cyborg, but I think you get the idea.
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I think it's really cool.
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Now, with this degree, you're going to have to have a firm grasp of engineering principles like mathematics and science.
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But you're also going to combine that with a little bit of health care knowledge.
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So you're going to be taking a lot of anatomy and physiology classes.
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Now, because of the fact that you'll be making products that human beings will quite literally be using, not just physically, but they might be inside of somebody's body,
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you have to think of things from a little bit of a marketing perspective as well.
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A lot of people would be very weirded out by putting some sort of technology inside of their body, and so you need to make things as ergonomic and pleasing as possible.
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Now around 7,400 people graduate with this degree every year, so I'd say it's kind of mid-tier.
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It's not extremely rare, but it's also not a very common degree either.
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Now on these videos, I like to break things down into four different sections, and the first one we're going to be talking about is going to be salary or earning potential.
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Now with this degree, you'd expect to make around $67,000 a year starting out, and $116,000 in mid-career pay.
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You can compare that to a high and low paying type of degree
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and you'll see that this is on the higher paying side.
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As a biomedical engineer you'd make around $91,000 a year or $43 an hour.
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Another career path you might go down is becoming a materials engineer and they make around $93,000 a year and $44 an hour.
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Now there are some related occupations that you might end up going down
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and I'll have some of those pop up on the screen right now.
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You can check those out.
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You can pause the video if you want to.
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And another thing to mention here is that engineers in general over a lifetime make really good money.
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Actually more than any other type of degree at around 3.5 million dollars compared to the average degree which is 2.4 million.
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Now keep in mind this is the latest census
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which would be the last 40 years or so and so who knows what's going to happen in the next 40 years.
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It could be engineering is the highest or maybe technology or something completely unrelated would take its place.
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But overall that is a good sign and
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because of all these things I'm going to give this one a score of 9 out of 10
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when it comes to salary.
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Next we're going to be talking about satisfaction and this one is extremely subjective.
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For one person it might be the most amazing degree, the most amazing career ever, and for another person it might be awful.
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So keep that in mind.
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Take this section with a grain of salt.
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For you it might be a 10 out of 10.
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Put your own score in there.
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With that being said I like to focus on meaning
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and job satisfaction because these are the to most subjective things that we can look up and measure on the internet.
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So when it comes to meaning, which is basically how much you think your career positively impacts the world, pay scale shows that biomedical engineering is at around 72%.
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You can compare that to ones that have high and low meaning scores, and you'll see that it's definitely on the higher side of things.
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Now, if you get this degree and you actually end up becoming a biomedical engineer, it gets even better.
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They have a meaning score of 82%, and if you look at their job satisfaction, it is 69%.
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And again, you can compare that to one that has really high scores
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and one that has really low scores and you'll see that is on the higher side.
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So if you are able to become a biomedical engineer you'll likely be very happy and satisfied with your job.
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On top of that engineering majors in general tend to be degrees that people end up not regretting.
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Engineering is the third least regretted type of degree only around 15% of people regret it.
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And the main reason is
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because some of the better jobs out there are going to require an advanced degree like a master's or a doctorate.
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With that being said, like I mentioned before, this is extremely subjective.
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It could depend on the company you work for, the particular career path you went down, the industry that you end up working in, where you live, the people you work with.
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There's so many different things that are going to influence how happy you are with your job.
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I think one of the reasons this one has such high job satisfaction
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and meaning is because you are very directly helping people.
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So a lot of the time you're going to be designing devices
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that you think are going to literally save someone's life or maybe prolong their life or improve their quality of life.
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And so that can give you a lot of meaning.
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A lot of healthcare degrees in general have high meaning scores and oftentimes they'll have good job satisfaction as well.
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And I think that's the reason is because you're directly helping people.
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There's a lot of other careers where you might be helping people, but it's a little more indirect.
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You don't necessarily get to see the fruits of your labors.
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So with that being said, I am going to give this one a score of 8.5 out of 10.
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It's one of the engineering degrees that has the highest meaning and job satisfaction.
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And next we're going to be talking about demand, and this is where this one doesn't do quite as well.
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So when you look on BLS, you'll see that there's 21,000 jobs available right now, and it's growing at 5%, which is a little faster than average.
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So that means over the next 10 years there's going to be 1,000 new jobs that pop up, but remember what I talked about before, there's around 7,000 people graduating every year.
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So one of the big weaknesses here is that if you want to become a biomedical engineer, you don't necessarily have to get a biomedical engineering degree.
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A lot of people who go down that career path get mechanical engineering degrees
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and then they just specialize and take extra classes in order to become biomedical engineers.
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And on top of that, if you get a mechanical engineering degree, you've got a lot more flexibility.
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There's so many other career paths you could go down.
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So if your plans don't work out for whatever reason, maybe you meet somebody and you decide that you're gonna sell everything and move somewhere so that you can marry them, you have other options.
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Whereas if you get a biomedical engineering degree, it's not gonna be nearly as flexible.
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You are pigeonholing yourself somewhat.
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Now, one career path you might end up going down is becoming a materials engineer
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and they have around 27,000 jobs available now and they're growing at 2% which is slower than average.
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So that one is going to have a lot of the same problems.
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Now when it comes to unemployment in general of course you know things could be different here in 2020.
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There's not any good statistics out right now on the specific degrees
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but generally speaking STEM degrees have favorable unemployment rates
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and engineering degrees are some of the best out of all the STEM degrees.
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Now one little test I like to do is to look up biomedical engineering degree on monster.com
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and you'll see that around 2,750 jobs pop up, meaning there's around 2,700 jobs that have that specific keyword in their job description.
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Now again, you can compare this to a really good one and a really bad one, and you'll see that it's kinda on the lower side.
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There's not that many employers or hiring managers out there that are looking for people with this specific degree.
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So again, that is a little bit of a red flag
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but one thing I always like to say about engineering degrees is even
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if you don't end up working in the specific engineering field
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that you were going for i.e. biomedical engineer a lot of
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the time they just tend to be a little more well respected than other types of degrees.
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So for instance you might give up on being a biomedical engineer
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and then you apply for a completely unrelated job in business, for instance, and you might end up getting it just because of the fact that engineering degrees tend to be well-respected.
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And you can see that when top companies are surveyed on what majors they're looking for to hire, engineering degrees are consistently at the top.
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So they're usually either the number one or number two type of degree.
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But with that being said, when you compare this one to a degree like mechanical engineering, it's much more recognizable.
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So a lot of the time, people who have been hiring for a while likely would have hired somebody with a ME or mechanical engineering degree already.
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So they'd be more comfortable hiring this person for a position that's unrelated, whereas somebody who has a biomedical engineering degree, they're kind of a wild card.
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They might be the first person that a hiring manager has ever seen that has had that major.
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So it's almost like some of the more common engineering degrees have real estate within people's brains.
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They're just more used to it and
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so therefore even though maybe you're just as good as a mechanical engineer they might not trust you as much.
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So with that being said
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when it comes to demand I'm going to have to give this one a 7 out of 10.
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Next we're going to be talking about x factors and this is basically anything that's important that we didn't go over before.
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So you remember before how I mentioned that over a lifetime engineering degrees in general tend to earn really good money.
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So about 3.5 million over a lifetime compared to 2.4 million for all other types of degrees.
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The lifetime earnings tend to be really high paying no matter what career you end up going into.
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So for instance, I always like to show arts and media on average, it's only 2.4 million over a lifetime.
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But if you get an engineering degree and then you become an artist, you know, arts and media, you're going to earn around $3 million.
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Another great example is community service and legal.
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So, you know, 1.8 million dollars for all types of degrees and 3.2 million for engineering.
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Now again this could be correlation or causation.
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It could just be the engineers are super smart and
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so they would have been successful no matter what they did
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or it could be that you know
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when you get a degree it's going to teach you certain skills that are going to help you later on in life.
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So I think it probably has a little bit to do with both.
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Now when it comes to these skills you're going to learn biomedical engineering is pretty specific
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and ZipRecruiter does not have an index for that.
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However, mechanical engineering is going to be pretty close and they have it at 77 out of 100.
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And again, you can compare that to a really good one and a really bad one, and you'll see that it's on the higher side.
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So the skills that you learn will likely be pretty valuable, but you're going to have to prove yourself to your employer.
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It might be pretty difficult for you to get your first job, especially if you don't end up becoming a biomedical engineer.
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And again, the reason for that is
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because they're just going to be much more familiar with people who have mechanical engineering degrees
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and why take the chance when you know what you're getting
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when you hire someone with a different degree that's much more common.
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With that being said, it's very unlikely that any type of engineering degree, especially biomedical engineer, is ever going to be automated.
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So according to Will Robots Take My Job, only a 4% chance here.
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And when it comes to outsourcing, it's the same thing.
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A lot of the time you're going to have to be working in person, and many engineering degrees are basically like the middleman between a technician and a scientist,
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so you're someone who's going to be actually touching things in person, and that's just never gonna be able to be automated or outsourced.
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Part of it might be but definitely not all of it.
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There's a lot of creative intelligence involved there and I just really doubt
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that it'll ever be fully outsourced or fully automated and
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if it is then pretty much everything is going to be by that point.
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Now another thing I always like to mention is
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that engineering is a great segue into entrepreneurship and the reason I say
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that is because it's the number one type of career that creates the most millionaires as well as billionaires.
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And I think the reason for that is because it basically just teaches you practical problem solving.
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And so a lot of the time you're going to be working a few years, you get some skills, you get some experience, and then you're going to recognize an opportunity where there's a problem that isn't currently being solved.
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And if you're able to solve that problem, you know, bring value to the market, then there's a very good chance that you can become a millionaire.
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But I always like to mention as well, engineering's tough.
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There's a really high dropout rate and there's a reason for that you know, I have spent a lot of time around engineers and I'm telling you, they're pretty much just studying all the time.
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Now with this one, I think it's really a dark horse candidate.
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So it might not necessarily be really good right now.
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And the reason for that is because a lot of the time, the same jobs that you could get with a biomedical engineering degree, you can do with a mechanical engineering degree,
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and then you'd also have a lot more flexibility.
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But with that being said, this one is a dark horse candidate in my opinion.
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I think 10 or 15 years from now, this might be a big one.
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I see a lot of advancement that's going to be made in the near future when it comes to biomedical engineering,
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putting technology in humans and using technology in order to cure people or treat people that have different diseases or injuries.
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It could be 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, but I think it's inevitable that this is going to be an industry that really takes off.
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So overall I am going to give this one a 9 out of 10
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when it comes to x-factor and I'm fully acknowledging that I could be wrong on that prediction.
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Maybe it doesn't happen for another 60 or 80 years.
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So some of the pros here are the salary is great, you know most engineering degrees are going to have a good salary.
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It also has a high meaning score and the job satisfaction is good.
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And then another pro is that it's just cool.
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I mean I don't know maybe it's just me, but I think biomedical engineering is really cool.
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Some cons here is
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that some of the careers you might get into can be done by other degrees that are much more common, like mechanical engineering.
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Some of the companies might not be comfortable hiring someone with just a bachelor's.
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You might want to get a master's or a doctorate, depending on the position that you're going for.
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It's also a relatively rare degree, and so you might end up kind of pigeonholing yourself a little bit into a particular skill set.
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It's not necessarily as flexible as some of the other degrees
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or maybe it is as flexible it's just not recognized as being as flexible if that makes any sense.
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So the overall score here is going to be an 8.375 out of 10.
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This can be a very good one for the right person.
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As always make sure you do your research on this, make sure you plan it out, do your due diligence, you know figure out what career you're going for,
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talk to people who are in that career and make sure you know exactly what you're getting yourself into.
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If you want help doing research on different degrees
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and you don't want to wait for me to make a video about it, check out my college degree ranker down in the description below.
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I do think it's the best resource
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that has been created for people who are trying to figure out what degree would be best for them.
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Gently tap the like button, smash the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, etc. that you have on the video.
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Share the video, that actually helps a lot.
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And before you leave, check out my other videos right here.
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I made them just for you.
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 188 sentences and 3008 words to shadow. The speech runs for 14:25. The speaker talks fast, about 209 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| mechanical adjective | /məˈkænəkəl/ | Related to mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with forces acting on matter). |
| compare verb | /kəmˈpɛɚ/ | To assess the similarities and differences between two or more things [“to compare X with Y”]. Having made the comparison of X with Y, one might have found it… |
| hire verb | /ˈhaɪɹ/ | To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment. |
| satisfaction noun | /sætɪsˈfækʃən/ | A fulfilment of a need or desire. |
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| lifetime noun | /ˈlaɪf.taɪm/ | The duration of the life of someone or something. |
| necessarily adverb | /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/ | Inevitably; of necessity. |
| salary noun | /ˈsæləɹi/ | A fixed amount of money paid to a worker, usually calculated on a monthly or annual basis, not hourly, as wages. Implies a degree of professionalism and/or… |
| flexible adjective | /ˈflɛk.sɪ.bəl/ | Capable of being flexed or bent without breaking; able to be turned or twisted without breaking. |
| earn verb | /ɝn/ | To gain (success, reward, recognition) through applied effort or work. |
| solve verb | /sɒlv/ | To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out. |
| regret verb | /ɹɪˈɡɹɛt/ | To feel sorry about (a thing that has or has not happened), afterthink: to wish that a thing had not happened, that something else had happened instead. |
| unrelated adjective | Not connected or associated. | |
| subjective adjective | /səbˈd͡ʒɛktɪv/ | Formed, as in opinions, based upon a person's feelings or intuition, rather than upon observation or purely logical reasoning; coming more from within the… |
| whereas | /(h)wɛɹˈæz/ | In contrast; whilst on the contrary; although. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. | |
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| look up verb | /ˌlʊk ˈʌp/ | To have better prospects. |
| pop up verb | To come up with a "pop" sound. | |
| blow up verb | To explode or be destroyed by explosion. | |
| go over verb | To look at carefully; to scrutinize; to analyze. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 72 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, you'll, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, occupation /ˌɑkjʊˈpeɪʃən/, smash /smæʃ/, prediction /pɹɪˈdɪkʃən/, notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
- Long words — get the stress right: mechanical /məˈkænəkəl/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, unemployment /ʌn.ɪmˈplɔɪ.mənt/, flexibility /ˌflɛksɪˈbɪlɪti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like mechanical, compare, hire.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being said · are surveyed · be automated |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | degree which is · meaning, which is · people who go |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has ever seen · have spent · has been created |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.