2.2 PROFESSIONAL SUBJECT COMBINATIONS

In addition to Biomedical Engineering, a large proportion of the Masters of Science in Engineering involved in the study had selected their professional subjects included in their Master’s degree programme from the Department of Electrical Engineering or the Department of Information Technology. Table 1 presents a list of the most popular professional subjects (selected by more than 10 majoring students). The professional subjects referred to in the table were included by 90% of the study participants in the Master’s degree programme, together with Biomedical Engineering. Figures in the table column ‘BME major’ show how many of the persons majoring in Biomedical Engineering had studied one of the other professional subjects presented in the table as a minor subject. The next column of the table (‘BME minor’) shows in turn the number of the graduates majoring in one of the other professional subjects presented in the table who had studied Biomedical Engineering as their minor subject. Different professional subjects provided by the same department have partially been combined in the table (e.g. specialization lines Applied Electronics and Microelectronics have been combined under Electronics, and Theoretical Physics and Applied Physics have been included in the figures for Physics). In addition to Biomedical Engineering, the most popular professional subject included in the Master’s degree programme was Electronics, included in the degree programme by 24% of the respondents. This was followed by Digital and Computer Systems, Measurement Technology and Physics. These four professional subjects had been included in their degree programme by 65% of the participants, together with Biomedical Engineering. In addition to the professional subjects included in the table, students have over the years combined Biomedical Engineering studies with a number of professional subjects not mentioned in the table (such as Mathematics, Chemistry and Occupational Safety Engineering).

As was previously mentioned, a total of 137 Masters of Science in Engineering who had included Biomedical Engineering in their degree programme had submitted their Master’s thesis to Ragnar Granit Institute. Of the other University units to which those who had included Biomedical Engineering in their degree programme had submitted their theses, the Institute of Electronics (32 theses), Software Systems Laboratory (29), Signal Processing Laboratory (22) and the Institute of Physics (18) stood out. The remaining units accounted for 13% (34) of the theses by the study population, of which the most significant were those providing education in Industrial Management (10), Digital and Computer Systems (7) and Measurement Technology (6).

Among those who had completed a postgraduate degree at Ragnar Granit Institute, the most significant minor subjects supporting the major were Physiology (Faculty of Medicine at UTA), completed by five persons, and Technical Mathematics and Applied Electronics, each completed by two persons. Biomedical Engineering had been studied as a minor subject by three persons who had completed a postgraduate degree. Of them, two had majored in Signal Processing and one in Electricity and Magnetism.