The curriculum
The revised Bioengineering Science Curriculum combined basic biological science and traditional engineering. Berkeley life-science majors took a common core of lower-division courses-- including general chemistry, organic chemistry, introduction to molecular and cell biology, and introduction to integrative biology. In upper division, the individual life science student would specialize in one or more of the vast array of biological fields of study. The Bioengineeering Science curriculum included that common core plus two upper-division biology electives, allowing the bioengineering student to begin to specialize. We expected this specialization to continue in graduate studies and, then, throughout the student's professional life.
For traditional engineering, the common lower-division core included math, general physics, and introductory computer science. In addition to that core, the lower-division Bioengineering Science curriculum included the introductory courses in materials science, mechanics, and electrical engineering. Adding these courses to the lower-division biology core created a very challenging lower-division experience for Bioengineering Science majors. The elite students admitted to the program consistently proved to be more than up to the challenge.
At the junior level, the student was required to select four traditional engineering courses, each from a different area deemed especially relevant to bioengineering (e.g., rigid-body mechanics, fluid mechanics, mass transport, engineering thermodynamics, control theory, circuit theory). Furthermore, each student was required to pick a flavor for each choice (e.g., fluid mechanics and mass transport came in chemical-engineering flavors and mechanical-engineering flavors; control theory came in a mechanical-engineering flavor and an electrical-engineering/computer-science flavor). At the senior level, the student was required to pick four advanced (professional-level) courses in a single area of engineering. This was called a skills cluster, and was intended to give the student a salable set of technical skills to take to graduate school-- and, eventually, into professional life. There were senior-level bioelectronics and biomechanics courses available for a student to include in the skills cluster, if he or she desired; but the only required course that integrated biology and engineering was the college-wide upper-division course Introduction to Bioengineering, which was taught by a college-wide faculty team. That was a separate requirement, not part of a skills cluster.
For engineering in biology or medicine, where engineering is interpreted to be traditional, physical-science-based engineering (a combination of applied math and applied physics or applied chemistry), the 1983 curriculum still seems appropriate to me. It would be a reasonably optimized four-year version of Stanford's current Engineering +X option, with X being Biology. Taking math courses designed for math majors, physics courses designed for physics majors, chemistry courses designed for chemistry majors, engineering courses designed for traditional engineering majors, biology courses designed for biology majors,** the bioengineering student would be building an intellectual tool box, full of timeless knowledge, concepts and analytical skills. That, it seems to me, is what undergraduate education is about-- especially so at an elite university such as Cal. Students were expected to cap their undergraduate studies with graduate studies.*** The inquisitive student, eager to apply his or her newly acquired tool box sooner, could easily do so with an undergraduate independent-study project in a faculty research lab.
**Footnote: (Physics, math and chemistry departments typically are staffed and equipped to accommodate large numbers of engineering students in lower-division courses. Biology departments typically are not. The additional student load created by the Bioengineering Science program, although the student population of that program was relatively small, required augmentation of the resources allocated to the lower-division majors courses in biology.)
*** Footnote: (In those days it was the masters degree that was considered the professional credential in engineering. I recall Joe Pettit, a 1938 Cal graduate and President of Georgia Tech, making that point compellingly in a 1971 issue of Proc IEEE devoted to engineering education. An engineering masters program typically would add a full year of professional-level course work and, at Cal and many other places, cap that with an independent research project in which the student's tool box would be used to solve a challenging, practical problem.)
Freedom of choice
The extraordinary popularity of Berkeley's undergraduate Bioengineering Science program, after its 1983 revision, puzzled me; so I routinely asked students why they had chosen it. The common answer was science, technology and mathematics. For the premedical students, and for all the others, Bioengineering Science provided the greatest breadth of STEM choices available to Cal freshmen interested specifically in biology; and it gave each of them a chance to narrow his or her choice as he or she progressed into the upper division. This was wonderful for a high-school senior who loved biology, but also loved other STEM areas, and was not yet sure which direction to take in preparing for a career. With the help of Mike Williams (Chem E), we had even incorporated chemical engineering options into the program (at Cal, Chem E is in the College of Chemistry, not the College of Engineering). Not surprisingly, a substantial fraction of the students chose a Chem E skills cluster and continued into graduate school in that field-- often combining it with molecular biology, making an appropriate combination for the biotech industry. The College of Engineering does have a Materials Science department, but few high-school seniors knew much about that field. After taking the introductory Material Science course required of lower-division Bioengineering Science students, on the other hand, a substantial fraction of the bioengineering students chose a materials science skills cluster and went on to graduate studies in biomaterials. And a substantial fraction went on to graduate studies in cellular or molecular biology, or in integrative biology-- thoroughly equipped by the program to do so. As one might expect, the most popular choices for specialization were electrical engineering and mechanical engineering. Along with medicine and bioengineering, those also were the most popular choices as the students went on to graduate studies. As a curriculum adviser for the Bioengineering Science program, my own experiences as a student made it easy for me to relate to the evolution each of my advisees was experiencing. For each of them it was a voyage of discovery; and it seemed that each of them was enjoying living it as much as I was enjoying watching them do so.
As the new Berkeley Bioengineering Department was taking shape in the late 1990s, the Bioengineering Science curriculum was phased out, replaced by a new set of departmental curricula. Core engineering subjects now presumably would be taught with a bioengineering flavor. What remained of Bioengineering Science was the spin-off program, Engineering Undeclared. Applicants for freshman admission to Cal engineering are allowed to apply to only one program or department. The Engineering Undeclared option allows one to postpone selecting his or her flavor of engineering until he or she has gained some experience in lower-division courses. But by applying to it, a student precludes application to any other Berkeley program or department. Freshman admission to Engineering at Cal is exceedingly competitive, but especially so for the Undeclared option. Thus, that option has the potential of being an attractive trap for applicants. As one of the founders of that option, I find that fact dismaying. Engineering Undeclared was put in place to help students, not to harm them. Given the arbitrary nature of admissions decision processes at that level of competition, selection has become much more an actuarial matter than a matter of applicant talent and achievement.
Last updated 05/20/16