Thanks for the response. My son has been able to talk to faculty within the Biomedical Eng programs at RU and Boston U which are the two schools he is down to. Everything he has heard from those programs seemed to align with what he wants to be involved with.
BU would get the nod here based on program rankings, school reps and location(he loves boston), but RU counters with an invite to the Honors College and generous scholarship, making the cost difference >50K a year, which isn't chump change. Obviously BU is a place lots of firms recruit from, and RU played up location in NJ and the pharma corridor, but do you have any insights on how industry views the program at RU?
Sounds like he's doing the appropriate research. One thing I have read, though, is that many BME's have had trouble getting internships and jobs compared to other kinds of engineers and scientists, perhaps because the "science" folks view them as being not scientific enough and the "engineer" folks view them as not having rigorous enough training in eng'g. Don't know how accurate this is, but you can find forums (reddit) where people talk about these things. Don't think it's a showstopper, but worth him investigating a bit, if he goes BME.
Anyway, with respect to what I can add regarding my experience, that's mostly in chemistry and chem/biochem eng'g, which is related, but not exactly the same, obviously, as BME. Anyway, to begin with, Merck is a worldwide leader in chemical discovery and process development and tech transfer to manufacturing with both the chemistry and chemical eng'g departments considered at or near the top in Pharma. In chemistry, Merck did not recruit heavily from Rutgers or BU (but did recruit from RU on occasion).
In chemical/biochemical eng'g (not the same as biomedical eng'g), Merck recruited from Rutgers as a core school, as I've posted about many times, since I was the lead Merck recruiter for Rutgers engineers (primarily chemical/bioch, but the occasional biomed and mechanical too) for about 12-13 years, hiring dozens of interns (2-3 per year from RU and about 9 other schools) and about 15-20 full time engineer hires from RU over that time.
In addition, I was on the chem eng'g R&D dept senior staff for about my last 15 years at Merck and throughout that time, close to half of the senior staff, including two of the best dept. heads, were RU grads, so RU grads actually did better, on average, in a highly competitive dept., than grads from MIT, Berkeley, Princeton, PSU, UVA, Ill, UM, GT, etc. (the other primary eng'g schools we recruited from). We never recruited anyone from BU that I know of, which is not to say it's not a good school, but I would give RU the edge here, particularly in eng'g and by a little bit in chemistry.
With regard to rankings, both schools are pretty highly ranked in engineering and biomedical engineering (but not at the top), but please don't go by USNWR, which is generally not taken seriously by industry in any way, that I know of. I did recruit/hire a couple of biomedical eng'g folks, who wanted to get more into chem/biochem process eng'g (which is a bit different from biomed, which is more focused on things like medical devices, implants and such whereas biochem eng'g is more focused on things like fermentations and other bioprocesses to make biomolecules) and they did well.
