Hi everyone! I hope you find yourself enjoying a beautiful day as you read this!
As a member of various Viterbi organizations, I find it impossible to choose only one as a favorite. With so many amazing clubs, it is difficult to even choose a select few in which to participate, let alone a favorite from the ones I have chosen!
One of the best parts of having engineering friends is getting to live vicariously through one’s friends! I love hearing about all the incredible things my friends are doing in Rocket Lab, Hydroloop, SC Racing, Corpus Callosum, Iridescent, SWE, and so many other professional, social, and design groups. I can honestly say the engineers at Viterbi amaze me more and more every day with the neat things they design and organize!
Within Viterbi, I am involved most significantly in 3D4E, the 3D printing club on campus, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and the Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering (ASBME). I am also involved in VSA of course, which is a great community of people and offers an amazing opportunity to work with folks all over Viterbi as well as potential new Trojans, which is very exciting!
Every organization I work with offers something different, ranging from professional to community service to design skills. As it would be literally impossible to choose between apples and oranges so to speak, I am going to instead talk about some recent highlights in ASBME (with more news on these other great groups to come throughout the year!).
ASBME is an amazing group here at USC that specifically serves Biomedical Engineers – their mission is to build community within Biomedical engineering, provide access to networking resources and professional development, and inspire a love of BME in the local community. As an amazingly fast-growing field, Biomedical Engineering offers numerous opportunities in various careers from consulting to research and development to medical practice to entrepreneurship. It requires that students take classes across a multitude of different disciplines – as a matter of fact, the BME course schedule features classes from every department within Viterbi, including subjects such as computer programming, statics, thermodynamics, mathematical modeling, material science, circuitry, and even business alongside typical classes in biology and chemistry. I truly love this field because being a BME in some ways means being a jack-of-all-trades. In order to approach medical problems, biomedical engineers use knowledge across every discipline applied to create medical instruments, devices, and treatments. With such a vast array of available applications, ASBME serves a vital role in helping students figure out what they want to do!
Every other week, ASBME offers weekly meetings that feature a variety of speakers from different BME related disciplines – some weeks are devoted to professional development (teaching resume building, linkedin workshops, interview and networking training, and pitch practice), applications of BME in medicine, consulting, finding corporate internships, and leadership development among other things. ASBME also hosts several professional events throughout the year, including the Biomed Research Symposium where professors and graduate students present about their biomedical research happening on campus, and Spring Evening With the Industry, a fancy networking dinner connecting BME students with over forty recruiters from more than a dozen BME focused companies.
Apart from professional and career programs, ASBME also offers a lot of exciting BME design experiences. Every spring for the Viterbi carnival, ASBME students compete in the bionic pig race, in which they redesign a mechanical pig to race in a highly competitive tournament (the winner of which gets serious bragging rights – there is a lot of BME dignity involved). This year work is even in motion for the first ever BME Make-a-thon, a design competition for BME students to pilot new medical devices and inventions.
Bionic Piggy 🙂
All bionic pigs to the mark….
ASBME additionally provides multiple community events, like Project-In-A-Box, which teaches BME lessons to local elementary school kids. We also host beach bonfires, trips to Sky High Trampoline Park, hikes around Los Angeles, an annual Thanksgiving Dinner, and an amazing mentorship program that connects underclassmen BME students with upperclassman to encourage and support them!
ASBME at Sky High!
ABSME at the Hollywood Sign!
This year I am serving as the ASBME Viterbi Liaison on the Executive Board, meaning I am in charge of planning the Fall Networking Dinner and seeking other professional opportunities for our students. It has been a great learning experience to understand all the elements that go into planning a corporate event, such a contacting hundreds of BME company representatives and coordinating all the technical details like food and room reservations. I am so excited to see how it all turns out, and hope it is a great opportunity for our ASBME students!
ASBME is a great community of awesome, goofy, talented, and all-around genuinely kind people who are profoundly unique beyond their engineering degree. I have learned so much from these other BME students, and am so grateful for this great group of friends who truly represent “engineering plus,” in that they gifted far beyond their degree and we be major game changers in this world who make big differences with big ideas.
ASBME has managed to do an incredible diversity of things within the parameters of a very specific major, which is truly remarkable – check out the website and twitter below to follow ASBME and see all the great upcoming and past events!=
To all potential future BME’s – welcome to the fabulous field of Biomedical Engineering family on behalf of ASBME!
And to all non-BME’s, our recent shirt design says it all – You wish you could B ME!
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