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Cornell has the biological engineering with enviromental enginnering option....what does that mean? what's the difference btw that and biomedical engineering?

By E1c2c3c (E1c2c3c) on Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - 12:33 am: Edit

Okay, Cornell has a department called BEE, which stands for Biological and Environmental Engineering. Basically there are two routes you can take within this major, a "biological" focus or an "environmental" focus. About 3/4 of the students in BEE belong to the biological side, and the rest of the major are the people going for environmental engineering option. Within the biological engineering focus, one can concentrate in biomedical engineering, bioprocess engineering, or two other bio-related engineering fields. So, if you want to pursue a concentration in biomedical engineering, BEE is the only department at Cornell would offer you that. However, there are other ways to get your a biomedical engineering minor or a bioengineering option, and this is what makes everything very complicated.
There is a biomedical engineering program at Cornell, which accepts graduate students and gives out biomedical engineering degrees to undergraduate student, but this program is NOT the same as BEE. For some reason, Cornell refuses to combine the biological side of BEE with the newly found biomedical engineering program due to various reasons from financial statues to academic politics (I have heard stories that the department chairs from BEE and BMEP don¡¦t get along, but I am not sure about the validity of these stories). As of now, you can get a biomedical engineering concentration from the BEE department if you affiliate with BEE, or you can get a minor in biomedical engineering minor as an engineering undergrad from any engineering disciplines (including BEE). I know this is pretty stupid and confusing, but this is pretty much what biomedical engineering is like at Cornell right now. Hopefully in the near future, they can sort out the confusion and differences, and just make one big biomedical department (and one big environmental engineering department too).