Mike Mulhall is a Development Engineer with Advanced Surgical Concepts, and has been in his job for nearly two years.

I received an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from NUI, Galway which could have gotten me into dozens of different careers. A degree in Biomedical Engineering would have been more specifically geared towards my job but it wasn’t available at the time and although it would have helped it wasn’t an absolute necessity.

What attracted you to this career?

I enjoyed physics and maths at school and this prompted me to do Mechanical Engineering in college. Learning about how things work has always interested me. During third year I began to take an interest in the biomedical side of things and then got a job with a surgical device company for 6 months during a placement program organised by the college. I enjoyed those six months so much there was no doubt in my mind that it was what I wanted to do. I was never that interested in designing large machinery or using pure mathematics all the time and with this field of engineering I get to use many different skills I’ve learned and developed.

Describe a typical day in your job.

There are lots of different aspects to my job and because of this I don’t really have a typical day. In ASC we design and manufacture surgical tools from concept to finished product. My job on a project is to help in the initial design of the device taking into account what we learn from surgeons and from visiting operations to see what kind of devices and methods are currently being used and then trying to solve problems based on these findings. We build and test prototype devices that solve the problems and decide which ones to take further into testing and production. I choose materials that have the right properties and also decide how a prototype device that has been made in our workshop can be made using machines available in a manufacturing cleanroom. I help in designing any tools we might use for the moulded parts of the device and decide the way the device will be manufactured in the quickest and least expensive way. I do a lot of testing on the devices and materials before, during and after they are made to make sure they do the job for which they were built. There is also a lot of paperwork that needs to be done to verify the safety of the device so that it gets approval from the FDA and European standards organisations. Usually each project is fairly different and I might have to learn new skills in order to see them through to a finished product.

Does your job match the expectations you had for it before you started it?

It is pretty much exactly what I expected but then again there are always surprises around the corner. We might be working away at a problem and suddenly someone has an idea that involves some new method of element analysis or pneumatics so I would have to go off and learn as much as I could about this new method and try to apply it to our problem. So, although broadly speaking, the job is just what I thought it would be like I never thought I’d get to do so many different things.

What are the best things about your job?

Learning so many new and useful things all the time is great. Coming up with a solution to a problem that no one else has managed to solve is one of the most rewarding aspects to this job.

What are the worst things about your job?

All the paperwork and some of the testing involved in bringing out a new device or making a change to an old one can be a very tedious but necessary aspect to working in the medical device industry in general.

What are the key skills you require for your job?

There are of course practical skills and knowledge I use all the time like mechanical drawing or material processing techniques, but anyone can learn these skills. You have to be a good problem solver first and foremost. In order to do this in a professional way you need to have a good grasp of physics and maths and an understanding of the laws that govern the way moving and stationary parts interact with each other without having to actually see them. This kind of visualisation and mathematical ability is a skill you can develop during college but it might be hard to learn if you didn’t have an aptitude for it. You don’t have to be a genius at maths or anything like that – I’m certainly no genius – but if you don’t have any interest whatsoever in maths or physics you should steer well clear of engineering in general.

What advice would you have for someone who was interested in this career?

Get your school to organise a visit to any company that has a clean room and R & D facilities and that employs biomedical engineers so that you can see what it’s like first hand. You should also organise a visit to a college with a biomedical/mechanical engineering program. Lecturers are usually more than happy to help prospective students since it’s in their interests to attract students to their courses. You could also try to find out as much as you can from company and university websites.

If you were now to change careers, what could/would you do?

With a mechanical engineering degree there really is a massive choice of careers I could pursue but I really have no idea what field I’d rather be in. People who graduated with me have gotten jobs working on very diverse things from developing Formula One cars with the Jordan team and jet engines with British Aerospace to designing oil rigs and remote controls for orbiting telescopes. Others have continued with their education and are studying for PhDs and Masters in science and engineering subjects. A biomedical engineering degree, although it sounds fairly different to mechanical engineering, is basically the same degree with just a few different subjects so the same would apply for graduates of that course.