Part 4: UMST And Choosing BME

Why BME

I chose BME because it matched how I already thought: strong biology interest combined with technical problem-solving. I did not want a path that was only abstract theory or only pure hardware. BME is an integration space where physiology, devices, data, and engineering constraints all meet in one field. That combination made sense from the start.

My long-term direction was already leaning toward graduate research in bioengineering, specifically around cell-level systems, tissue models, and translational platforms. The degree structure at UMST built directly toward that.

UMST Courses That Mattered Most

The life-science-heavy side of the curriculum included courses like Cellular Biochemistry and Biomedical Physics, alongside anatomy and physiology content that built strong biological context. On the engineering side, I went deep on Electrical Circuits, Analogue Electronics, and later Digital Logic Design.

That combination is why the program worked for me. I was not choosing between biology and engineering. I was training in both at the same time.

Organ-On-Chip: A Direction I Was Always Tracking

Organ-on-chip was something I followed long before it was on any syllabus I had access to. The field — microengineered platforms that model human tissue behavior well enough to run meaningful disease and drug tests — was not being taught at UMST. It was too specialized, too resource-intensive. But I was reading about it anyway.

A paper that gave me the clearest frame for why it matters: Huh et al.'s lung-on-chip work published in Science in 2010. Reconstituting organ-level lung functions on a chip. What the paper does well is the testability argument: these platforms tighten the loop between biological questions and engineering validation in a way standard models can't.

I've written more about this field, the follow-on work, and where it intersects with my UofT coursework: Organ-On-Chip: A Field I've Been Following →

What I Did At UMST Outside The Classroom

The activities I was involved in during UMST:
Breast Cancer Research representative — representing early-stage diagnostic research work from the university.
Hult Prize — worked on Nile Threads, a social enterprise concept developed for the competition.
Pitching and business-model workshops — led sessions for student teams on structuring pitches and validating ideas.
Medical equipment sales at Luqman — hands-on exposure to how clinical hardware moves through a market context.
Pharmaceutical assistant at Unimed — operational exposure to the pharma distribution side.

One honest reflection: I was heavily focused on academics and could have built more side collaborations earlier in the degree. The activities above were meaningful but came in bursts. The lesson I took is that parallel building during structured study is not a distraction, it is part of the output. That has been a design rule for the chapters since.