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This site cannot speak authoritatively for all industry needs for bioengineering, but can offer some perspectives from programs that have tried to determine industry needs.  The comments here are distilled mainly from comments of a panel of industry representatives who spoke to faculty and students at the VaNTH Quarterly Meeting in the Summer of 2001, and a similar panel at the first CUBIC (Chicago Universities Bioengineering Industry Conference), sponsored by Northwestern, U Illinois Chicago and Illinois Institute of Technology in Winter, 2002.

Employers have a range of perspectives, from “We’re actively seeking bioengineers” to “We hire mainly electrical, mechanical…. engineers.”  There is also some tension between preparing students for the largest industries at present, and preparing students for emerging industries that may be quite different.  One of the goals of this project is to define the core of bioengineering, and encourage programs to provide this core knowledge, so that industry can begin to associate certain common skills with bioengineers, just as they can associate certain skills with other types of engineers.  This need not be limiting for a program, because these skills will probably only occupy a fraction of the curriculum.

Often cited requirements

· Adaptability
· Systems analysis/ systems level thinking
· Understanding of physiology
· Breadth, in order to grasp whole problem and translate medical needs to other engineers
· Writing and presentation skills for communicating succinctly to supervisors, peers, clients
· Knowledge of programming and instrumentation

Content – What to teach

Our view is that one can break the content down into two large segments, bioengineering content, and core competency content.  VaNTH organizes bioengineering content into bioengineering domains, which overlap.  For a number of these the taxonomy of knowledge in that domain is available.  Bioengineering content and Core competency content are equally important in the curriculum, and ideally should be integrated to some extent in individual courses.  Our view is that they are orthogonal to each other, as shown, so that one can teach writing or design, for instance, in the context of any domain.  This does not mean that one might not also want to teach writing or design as separate courses,  but student engagement and transfer are likely to be enhanced by teaching within the context that most interests the student.