Page 5 - My FlipBook

Early in her college studies,
Gilda Barabino thought she
wanted to be a medical doctor.
But she said she was too
squeamish so she switched to
chemical engineering to study
the flow of blood and other
fluids. At City College in New
York, her research focuses on
engineering cartilage.

PhD route, start by earning your bachelor’s degree in an established field
such as biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, or engineering.
Think about a problem you want to solve, Barabino tells students.
Think about something that’s important to you. “Young people usually have
something in mind: ‘I want to save the world. I want to make a difference.’ I
tell them to think about engineering as a strategy to do that. What you get
out of engineering are a set of tools, a way of thinking and problem solving.
But I would posit that you don’t have to see yourself as a tinkerer to be
an engineer,” Barabino says. “I think there’s a little bit of an engineer in
everybody. It’s curiosity! Everybody wants to know how things work.”
In college Barabino studied chemistry, with an eye to going to medical
school. She decided she was too squeamish to be a doctor, but she still
wanted to help people. “I decided that engineering should allow me to apply
some basic fundamental concepts to medicine,” she said. So she earned
her PhD in chemical engineering. Her initial focus was on fluid mechanics

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CAREERS IN BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING