Medical v. Aerospace

[jeckle]

Does anyone have any experience in switching from one to the other? I recently changed from Aero to Medical, and am now having second thoughts.

 

[MikeHalloran]

I went from "sort-of-aero", flight simulator hydraulics and structures, to "in vitro" medical, blood cell counters, which have enormously complex fluid systems, and more. Same equations, different scale. Bolts is bolts. Because the blood never returns to the patient, the FDA is only interested in whether the machines produce accurate results, so they look over your shoulder once in a while, but they don't live in your back pocket, unless you screw up.

"In vivo" medical, where what you do contacts the patient directly or indirectly, or internally, is more heavily regulated, for the obvious reasons and because physicians run the companies, and many are arrogant enough to insert themselves in technical decisions despite a generally tenuous grasp of physics.

I get the impression that within the "in vivo" universe, everybody who is anybody has an M.D., and a string of initials after that, and everyone else is just "the help", largely interchangeable, except for people who work or have ever worked in "in vivo", who are beneath contempt.

The "in vitro" universe is a little closer to the one that includes Earth.





Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[jeckle]

Well I think thats pretty accurate for the most part, except they don't necessarily have MD's. But non technical people seem to have an undue amount of influence / power. We basically get direction from marketing. When I was in aerospace it was the engineers who ran the show period. The problem here is that you can not make judgments and or decisions based on basic mechanical or engineering principles. The regulation and oversight is cumbersome, and the fear essentially paralyzes decision making and planning. I think that is crazy though, the parts we made for aerospace had a much more direct life or death impact than the junk I work on now. Also, the government was either right there with us, or we had a designated representative.

I'm thinking of returning to aerospace but my concern is that aerospace is a dying field and medical is the better industry.

 

[ctopher]

I have been mostly aerospace. Did a little with medical. I enjoy medical. But, both you get to work with new materials, lots of changes & deadlines. Aerospace isn't dying, it's just more spread out than it used to be.

Chris
SolidWorks 07 3.0/PDMWorks 07
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 03-13-07)

 

[MikeHalloran]

Aerospace spread out? I'd say it's agglomerated. E.g. if you piss off L-M, where else will you go? There are other choices, but not nearly as many as there used to be. The industry is not dying, but Uncle Sugar is still pushing to have just one vendor for everything ... as opposed to the old, equally dysfunctional system where the same engineers did the work for everything, but lost their pensions between contracts.

Medicine is somewhat less agglomerated, and medical startups have a much better chance of growing rather than evaporating. I don't mean to say that their chances are good, just better than an aerospace startup, mostly because of the much smaller amount of capital required to enter production.



Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

 

[ctopher]

I meant spread out as throughout the world vs in hot spots like it used to be. So California used to be a hot spot for aerospace.

Chris
SolidWorks 07 3.0/PDMWorks 07
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 03-13-07)

 

[IRstuff]

There's still evil empire 1 and evil empire 2, plus a host of evil empire wannabees, like us ;-)

TTFN

Eng-Tips Policies FAQ731-376

 

[ctopher]

Who ya call'n a wannabee?


Chris
SolidWorks 07 3.0/PDMWorks 07
AutoCAD 06
ctopher's home (updated 03-13-07)

 

[plasgears]

If I had a chance to do it all over again, I would have gone the bio-eng route. Aerospace was the route to a first job when I got my eng degree.

A friend from another eng school confessed concern that all the jobs were in aero, weapons, etc. I advised him that there was a whole other world out there in bio-eng, and he went to med school right after eng school. He probably wrote his own ticket after med school.