So we are back into the full swing of things now, a third of the way up the cliff of Semester Two and becoming increasingly weary of the crux that lies above us.
The majority of us BME’s are sitting four papers this semester, and I am pleased to report that they are all very interesting. 
At the front of the line, we have MEDSCI 142, our token biology/medicine paper that has started off a lot more chill than BIOSCI 107 did last semester. Don’t get me wrong though – it’s only a matter of time before the inevitable crisis approaches, but so far the content has been good, the lecturers great and the labs very hands-on. It is a very well structured course and essentially focuses on a lot of anatomy and physiology of basic body systems. Stay tuned though, because future updates will be essential.
Next up is our touch of mathematics, and this comes through BIOMENG 261 which has the fancy label of ‘Tissue and Biomolecular Engineering’ – if you ever needed to flex with your friends. This course revolves around modelling biological processes, and so far we have covered some enzyme kinetics, metabolic reactions and then stuck the results of these onto Matlab plots. Oliver Maclaren takes the first half of this course, and Vinod (who also lectures the Semester One Course BIOMENG 221) takes the second half, and it is pretty much just a nice, chill course so far (I repeat, stay tuned for future updates :/).
Our other two courses are design (BIOMENG 241) and engineering management (ENGGEN 204). I feel like the design paper is a good representation of BME in general, where we are trying to cover pretty much every specialisation. The course is set up so that we have 12 weeks to complete a group project, which this year is a hand-held colour meter that will tell you what colour you are. Yeah not the most interesting project, but you can’t win them all. So far we have already covered standard design stuff like report writing, a bit of CAD design, some GUI development with LabView and now we are getting stuck into electronics. So there is definitely a little something for everyone.
ENGGEN 204 is a weird paper. I don’t know if I am a fan as of yet, but being an ENGGEN course it is always going to be a bit more right-of-field than your specialised papers. It is kind of like ENGGEN 115, but not really. We haven’t done CAD, we haven’t done orthographic drawings, and we have done anything that relates to technical skills. But in saying that, we have covered some pretty important stuff like written communication. That’s basically what the course is – a communication course to help with Management in Engineering, and at this point it’s probably a good idea that we cover this because us Engineering students don’t get much writing practise at all (as you can tell) and it is actually a pretty fundamental part of our career. The lecturer Jim Hefkey is a very gregarious character, and if nothing else, he makes the lectures worth it. We are currently working on a group project, and next post I will let you know what that involves.
Alright so when I started this blog I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a course review, and after two blog posts, I have 100% given you a course review. But now that this is out of the way, I hope that we can get a little more into the journey of a Biomedical Engineer so that you can decide whether it sounds like you or not.
Oh barnacles and I forgot to mention that ENGGEN 204 has no exam. Stoked.