Biomedical engineering is the bringing together of biology, medicine, the healthcare industry, and engineering. Biomedical engineers lead cutting edge research, create game-changing treatments, and develop medical devices. The options for a career in biomedical engineering are diverse, but there is one thing that they all have in common: you need to be insanely sharp. Smart, yes, but also quick and adaptable and curious. You need to have resilience, as any breakthrough comes with many, many setbacks, and you need to have patience as you approach learning a dynamic and complex field.
We work with our students to highlight these traits in their college applications by addressing the foundation of the application: how you spend your time. Your grades and scores must be exceptional, obviously, but getting into a top school takes more than straight-As. The activities you do are the differentiating factor between another top student and yourself, so extracurriculars really do matter and make a massive difference.
In this post, we’ll show you how to make the most of your junior year to ensure that your application packs a punch come senior fall.
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Below, we’ve broken down the key activity areas for juniors into a few big buckets. You don’t need to do all of these, but you do need to mix and match to create an impressive extracurricular line-up that shows how you have pushed yourself to prepare for the biomedical engineering field.
CLUBS & TEAMS
If you are not already in line to be a head of a club or an academic team related to engineering or STEM more broadly at your school by senior year, that is a problem. To stand out as a prospective biomedical engineering major, you need to have proven leadership and teamwork experiences. And you are a junior, so there really isn’t time to work your way up the ladder of a team you haven’t already been on — or haven’t committed to.
However, there is still time to stand out if you don’t have the guarantee of a leadership role. We advise juniors who are not already lined up for leadership to find opportunities for leadership within the organization. You may not be able to say “Captain” as your role for the club or team on your applications, but you could have “Build Team Lead”, or “Lead Mentor” appended to your name. These roles may not already exist, and you’ll have to figure out one that is ideal for your skills and passions, but you can create them through commitment and clear communication. A key piece of this is offering more than you are asking for. If you aren’t willing to give time and energy to a club or team at school, you can’t expect that group to do much of anything for you. But if you give it your all, you can get an amazing result that pays off come time to submit.
INTERNSHIPS
Internships are crucial for students interested in biomedical engineering, and junior year is the perfect time to make that happen. Now, you can’t expect to get an internship on the medical side, as there are regulations against untrained individuals having access to patients and personal medical information (although we have had students previously successfully pursue an EMT certification and work as a way of advancing an interest in medicine). That isn’t practical for most applicants, and it doesn’t address the engineering side of the biomedical engineering major. So, what are you to do?
Well, look at that engineering bit and find an opportunity in your area for an internship (paid or unpaid) that is with an engineering firm. It may not be a biomedical engineering firm, and that is okay, but you do want it to connect in some way to an aspect of engineering that you are passionate about. This may mean shadowing someone in a lab, helping process data, or working alongside a device design team. It may be super fun on some days, and insanely boring on others. That’s ok. It also doesn’t need to sound insanely impressive. You are in high school — you finding, securing, and completing an internship is insanely impressive on its own.
A key piece of making an internship pay off for you is how you make the most of it on your applications. This may mean a supplemental recommendation and an exceptional supplement that highlights your passion and curiosity in addition to its being a line item on your activity section.
RESEARCH
If you have secured an internship already, or if you have hit a wall with finding an internship opportunity, participating in research in some way is critical. You are, except in extremely extraordinary circumstances, not going to do some groundbreaking independent research that gains national acclaim. That type of impressive project is not out of the question, of course, if you want to go for it, you should, but it’s not good if that is the only goal you have in mind. Instead, we advise our students to set incremental goals that you can check off throughout their high school experience.
As a junior, you’re almost done with high school and your window of opportunity for research is narrowing very quickly. To make the most of the time you have left before submitting your college applications, we recommend that our juniors who haven’t already participated in research find a project that they can contribute to without having to start one entirely on their own. This may be something close to home, a project of a peer or educator, or it may mean connecting to with graduate students at a local research university. The best way to start, though, is by talking to your teachers who may have intel on opportunities you don’t know about yet.
SUMMER PROGRAMS
If you are a junior looking to strengthen your applications to college, summer programs are not the best place to start. You only have one summer left before you apply, and that is an ideal time for internships or research. It may also be a time you want to study for the SAT or ACT, but sometimes there are summer programs that warrant making time for. Remember, you are a junior, and you do not want to be doing a program full of freshman. Instead, any program you do should be for upperclassmen who are committed to biomedical engineering, or engineering more broadly. Ideally, this program would also be highly selective. Some are even free, although they require an intensive application process.
For example, the isn’t just free — students in this residential, four-week intensive for sophomores and juniors can earn a stipend.
Those types of programs require planning in advance, though. If the summer of junior year is coming up quickly and you don’t have an internship or research opportunity planned, we recommend accredited summer courses that are taught, in-person or online, to the collegiate level — and, to prove this, they should come with transferrable college credits.
As a junior interested in biomedical engineering, you are in a very important place at a very important time. You know what you want to do, but now you need to get yourself there. That’s where we can help. We specialize in working with strong students on exceptional applications. For the best college outcomes, students need to address more than just the frosting. Strong essays are critical, but the bones, or, rather, cake, has to be there too. We guide students towards their best outcomes by helping them long before they press submit.
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