Applying to 12 US Grad Schools, Admitted to 11: Danny on Bioengineering

Updated 2026/10/16

This post is a condensed version of the podcast transcript. Click the link 👉🏻 to listen to the full episode.

If you enjoy it, please leave the podcast a five-star rating on your favorite platform 🌟 (transcripts take a lot of work 🥹)!

---

Hi, and welcome to “Jason’s Career Folder.” I’m your host, Jason, and I’ve been sharing content about careers and studying abroad for a long time. Here you can “open” the folder and explore stories, and you can also “edit” it with me: build up your experience, pick up insights, and learn something new!

In this episode:

📂 Biomedical engineering careers and what you study: broad engineering skills for solving medical problems

📂 Learning a bit of everything but mastering nothing? Pick the niche you’re good at or enjoy, and dig into it yourself!

📂 Research experience: why he joined research projects from sophomore year, and what he got out of it

📂 Why study abroad? Why the US? Why a master’s instead of a PhD?

📂 How to write a Personal History Statement for US grad school

📂 Startup experience and the Epoch Foundation’s Young Entrepreneurs (YEF) program

📂 Becoming an AI Engineer? Where to learn: gather resources, find a mentor (to get feedback), and keep iterating quickly

📂 Why problem-solving and self-directed learning matter

📂 Figuring out your positioning and goals: gather information and find the common ground (without just following the crowd), then anchor yourself to principles and a direction

📂 Be bold with trial and error (within your guiding principles)

---

🎤 Guest: Danny (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bo-yen-chang/)

Master’s | UC Berkeley, Master’s in Bioengineering

Undergraduate | 2019~2022 Taipei Medical University, Biomedical Engineering, GPA: 3.9/4.0

---

J: marks lines from the host, Jason

D: marks lines from the guest, Danny

Danny introduces himself

J: Danny, could you start with a quick introduction?

D: Sure. Hi everyone, I’m Danny, and I’m happy to be invited here to share some of my application process. This year, in Fall 2023, I’ll be starting UC Berkeley’s Master of Engineering in Bioengineering.

D: I applied to 12 schools this year and got into about 11. I’m not saying that to sound impressive, and it doesn’t really prove anything. What it shows is that planning yourself, using your own strategy, and playing to your biggest strengths may matter more than anything else! You have to understand what you’re doing, so I’m glad to share how I thought it through.

J: I’m really happy Danny agreed to this interview! One more thing about Danny: we both graduated from Cheng Kung Senior High School, so today feels especially familiar. Let’s go in chronological order and start with his university experience!

What do you actually study in biomedical engineering?

J: I rarely come across biomedical engineering myself, so could you give us a quick overview of what the field mainly covers?

D: In Taiwan, biomedical engineering is pretty broad, or at least it sounds like a very broad subject, so it’s hard to define. I think everyone who studies it spends a long time figuring it out for themselves.

D: Now that I’ve graduated, I’d describe it like this: you need to notice the pain points around you, any medical problems that need solving. Then you learn a broad set of engineering skills and use them to solve that medical problem. So problem solving and engineering skills are the abilities you have to keep building!

D: That’s roughly it. If you want an exact definition, it’s not like computer science, where there’s a fixed set of things you learn that become your specialty. It’s harder to pin down. It’s more that you find the engineering area that suits you and then study what’s related to it. That’s why I think self-directed learning is so important!

J: Before you entered the biomedical engineering department, did you look into what you’d be studying?

D: For most people who come in, it’s honestly too new in Taiwan. There are two kinds of biomedical engineering. One is the traditional kind. Some universities, like Chung Yuan’s biomedical engineering program, have offered it for a long time, but that work is more like being in a hospital’s clinical engineering office: repairs, equipment assembly, procurement and so on. The newer kind of biomedical engineering mainly comes from the Bio Design concept abroad. The idea is that you see a clinical problem, learn broad engineering knowledge, or specify one area of engineering, and then work to solve it. So it’s fairly new. I didn’t understand that much about it while I was learning, but I knew back then that I wanted to keep medicine in the picture.

D: I feel the value the healthcare industry brings is irreplaceable, and engineering was probably something I was good at (I was good at physics and chemistry). I wanted to keep both, so the overlap is where I ended up. When you pick a major in university, it’s hard to know whether it really suits you, so it was probably a fairly conservative final choice.

J: So you happened to choose a major that suits you and that you really like! And you plan to keep going in biomedical engineering for grad school, right?

D: Right! As I studied it, I found I really liked it. Along the way I also went to see clinical settings and did an internship at a hospital. When you see engineering actually applied in a clinic, everything you’re doing feels especially worthwhile! The reward is very direct, unlike some engineering. If you work on the 2B side, the reward might be solving the problem itself, but what I like most is when the feedback comes directly from people, and I think this field has that.

What career paths do biomedical engineering graduates have?

J: I’d also like to understand what career paths biomedical engineering graduates have. A reader asked about career planning in biomedical engineering, and if you want to work in industry, which companies or roles you could go for.

D: In terms of industry, it differs between Taiwan and abroad, and between academia and industry. Speaking generally about abroad, really about the world in general, there are two paths. Abroad it’s a pretty deep subject. Some people study it as pre-med. But if you want to go deep, you need to understand medicine to a certain depth: how things work, the value of how they work physiologically, and how the healthcare industry as a whole operates. So abroad you need to understand both sides.

D: When you go really deep, you usually go into research, probably toward a PhD, and you’ll likely follow a very specified project! A professor might specialize in one area. The field is so broad that it includes mechanical, biological and EECS-related work, so a professor could work in an electrical engineering area, for example. Anything is possible! So professors are usually very cross-disciplinary. Some come from mechanical engineering, some from other fields.

D: If you do research, you can go purely the PhD route. The other path is industry. Some people go into medical software, some into medical hardware, and some become QA engineers. If you’re an engineer, some people join medtech companies. Besides medtech, there are startups, and another group actually works in clinical settings, helping with medical device procurement and evaluation, maintenance, IT and so on. So overall, pretty much any IT related to the healthcare industry counts.

Learn everything, master nothing? Wrong! Change your mindset and go deeper on your own!

J: Since you study both science-and-engineering and life-science subjects, does that mean you have more career options in the future?

D: You could say there are lots of career options, or you could say it’s too broad. I think about half the people who study it feel lost.

J: I studied business myself, so I can really relate. Is it similar to business, where you learn a lot of things but don’t specialize in anything?

D: A lot of people say that! But I think you have to change your mindset. When you study this subject, you can’t assume that if you just follow the school and finish the required courses, you’ll automatically have a certain set of abilities. In some subjects and at some schools, learning does work that way, but I’d say it mostly doesn’t in biomedical engineering!

D: You need to know that you’ll learn engineering in general: maybe materials, maybe mechanical, maybe electrical and electronics. You can imagine it has all of them. And when you reach a part and realize, “I especially like this, I’m especially good at this,” you should take the initiative and go deeper into that area yourself. For example, find a professor to do a research project with, find projects outside school, or if the school has projects, take on as many as you can. That’s how you raise your skills. If you rely on whatever the department teaches as the measure of what you can do, it’s easy to get lost, and in the end you may not know what you’re doing.

Research experience: why join research projects as early as sophomore year?

J: Since you mentioned research projects, I’d like to talk about your research experience. You started joining research projects in your sophomore year, so why did you want to get into research that early?

D: I think research projects are really important. It was early, but partly because the department half-forced us. When a department is newer and not fully built out, it can use research to help you fill gaps or deepen your skills, so they sort of half-push you into doing research.

D: I think getting into research in sophomore year is good, though it has upsides and downsides. You have almost no knowledge yet. Nobody really knows how to do much, and then you get pushed into a fairly advanced lab where you have to work hard. So you can imagine the jump in what you need to know is huge, and there’s a big gap. To fill that gap, you have to get to know the senior students really well, learn from them, and fill in all the deeper material yourself.

D: When I first joined, it felt a bit sudden, and I didn’t even know why I was doing it. My attitude was to try it first and see. Later I found that research is a really good process. It widens the range of what you know, and while you’re doing the work you’re also searching at the same time, so I think it’s a great way to build problem-solving skills. I only realized this later, but if you start early and find out you don’t like the field, switching quickly gives you more options, so that’s even better!

Why study abroad? Why the US?

J: Next I’d like to talk about studying abroad, since you applied to 12 schools and got into 11. Last time we chatted, we talked about something interesting: you mentioned that only 10% of graduates from your department go abroad, and most stay in Taiwan for grad school. So why did you choose to study abroad? And why the US?

D: Good question! At first, in freshman year, I didn’t really have the idea. Maybe there was a seed, but I didn’t think about acting on it. The main reason it came up is the nature of the field. If you stay in Taiwan, it gets grouped with the life sciences, and the Taiwanese industry may be too new in terms of funding and development, so not much money flows in. Plenty of people are working hard on it, but industry development in Taiwan is still very narrow. On top of that, if you really want to be strong in it, say as a Research Engineer in industry, you have to go very deep, and the company has to invest a huge amount of money.

D: Taiwan doesn’t seem to have that mindset or that funding coming in right now, so you realize that if you really want to go deep, studying abroad is a possibility. And actually the 10% figure isn’t fixed. More of us want to go abroad; it’s just that about 10% went this year, and I think quite a few will go next year too. People who think this way usually feel the subject is something they can accept and might be interested in. They’ve always known industry development in Taiwan is very limited. Honestly, for engineering in Taiwan, I think the top recommendation is EECS: electrical engineering goes into IC Design (as you know), and CS goes the computer science route. But even in CS, everyone heads to the US, because the Software Engineer environment abroad is so good, and it’s also quite good in Taiwan. So for them, studying abroad is almost an inevitable step.

D: What actually triggered it was this: while exploring during university, I did all kinds of projects. I’m a learning-by-doing person, so I joined a ton of projects, a lot of unusual ones, and honestly I burned out a bit in university. While learning, I worked on projects with some foreign friends, ABCs who had come back because of the pandemic. I noticed that their whole way of thinking and their problem-solving ability were on a different level, even though we were the same age. That made me feel that if I really wanted to make things happen, I should go out and see the world, and the idea suddenly took hold.

D: Through those projects, after doing so many things you notice that whatever you do in Taiwan always hits a limit. Either it’s your status: you’re a student, so you’re limited to a certain point. Or funding caps you at a ceiling. Or on projects, you can only develop the technology so far, and if you want to bring people around you together to help, there aren’t that many resources. I felt that very clearly! Because I’d done so many unusual things, I started thinking maybe I should try somewhere else. That became my intention: to push what I do past the level I was at. I felt I’d hit a ceiling, so I wasn’t getting as much out of my learning, and the rewards were limited too.

D: Choosing the US felt pretty obvious. I think most engineering students pick the US; it’s the easy choice. Of course some apply to science and engineering schools in Europe, but the US has a strong concentration of engineering industry, and the link between engineering and industry there is very close and very intense. They know how to turn things into products. In Europe I didn’t feel that nearly as strongly. The atmosphere in the US is more aggressive, which I think is good for learning!

Why apply for a master’s instead of a PhD?

J: Something else I wanted to ask: you have research experience, you joined many research projects, and you even have two published papers. So why did you apply for a master’s instead of going straight for a PhD?

D: Last October I was asking myself the same thing. Why not just apply for a PhD? It seemed like better value, and it wouldn’t cost much. I started going to events where people encouraged doing a PhD because it trains more solid problem solving, and I was pretty tempted. Later I joined a study-abroad application program called TYRA. Mentors guide you, mostly people doing scientific research, and they show you how to apply. Some of my peers who applied alongside me were going for PhDs, and I could see their mindset, and the mentors’ mindset too. They clearly don’t think much about industry. They do research, and they know they’re committing to five years. I honestly couldn’t imagine keeping the same level or the same thinking for five years and still wanting to do a PhD. Even a year or two from now, I don’t think I’d feel that way. People change a lot. And going back to my intention from before, my goal was to push what I do to a new level and to see how industry turns research into products.

D: With a PhD you might not see as much of that. You can, but mostly it keeps you engaged with your research and doesn’t let you think much about what’s possible in industry. When I do research, I think in a fairly industry-minded way: how could this be applied, how could it be turned into a product, or which technologies could I combine to make it work better in industry. With a PhD, I think you should be thinking more about how pure science fits together. That mindset is a bit different.

D: Also, people who truly want a PhD don’t seem to consider a master’s at all. That’s very clear. Their mindset is that they’re taking on the cost of five to seven years, and that determination is really strong. I don’t have that level of determination, so I don’t think I could do it.

J: And after a master’s, you can still apply for a PhD if you need to! It keeps your options open either way.

D: Exactly. And an unwritten rule, between us: if you go straight into a PhD, you’re at a slight disadvantage, because the level of school you can get into may drop a bit. Of course, for a PhD what matters more is your professor and whether their area is what you like, since you’ll be working with them so long, rather than the school itself. But some schools come with industry resources or more academic connections, and I felt giving that up would mean sacrificing what I originally wanted. Weighing it all, I clearly wasn’t going to choose a PhD for now.

J: That makes a lot of sense. You’ve convinced me!

D: I think pretty much everyone in engineering goes through this question. Some people who ask me often want a PhD because they feel their skills aren’t good enough yet, and a PhD would give them five to seven years to deepen one ability so they feel more solid before going into industry. But I’d say a PhD is a completely different deal. If you do a PhD, in industry you’re highly specialized in one very narrow slice of your field. Switching to industry afterward isn’t as smooth as you might imagine, and it isn’t really about building up your overall skills. That’s a different goal. So if you want to work in industry, do a master’s and don’t overthink it. A lot of people do a PhD just to feel reassured, hoping it makes them stronger. I think that way you may not be able to finish, and you might burn out once you’re there.

How did you write your Personal (History) Statement for US grad school?

J: Another question: when applying to US grad schools, you often get Personal History Statement prompts, like How your personal background and experience influence your decision to pursue a graduate degree. When you got these prompts, Danny, how did you come up with your answers and write the essays?

D: You see these essays a lot: the PHS, or what we call the SOP. I think they all share one logic: how to express yourself honestly. You can’t cater to what you think they prefer. Sure, you could argue you should cater to your audience, but think about it: your words carry feeling. So first, your words need to be very real about why you want to go abroad. Write them by hand or in notes and get them down fast. It’s fine if they’re weak, look ugly, or aren’t even polished language; that’s your logic. So for me, step one was real words. Next, you think about how to structure those thoughts. If you’re turning them into an essay, scope, structure, motivation, narrative flow and how compelling it is all matter. My approach was to link it together with events. Once you’ve actually listed your intentions, you’ll have some ideas, and then you take out your CV and circle the experiences that connect with those ideas.

D: It becomes very clear. If you type out your raw mind first, circling things on your CV goes fast and feels right. Then you start linking those experiences together, and they form a very logical process. You realize, “Oh, this is why I want to go to grad school.” You slowly convince yourself, or a bunch of questions come up along the way and you start exploring them. So I strongly recommend doing this yourself. Once you’ve really done it, you’ll know why you want to go abroad and why you want to pursue this idea. Somewhere in the process you might find that you could do the same thing in Taiwan, and then you have to ask whether going abroad really suits you. Abroad isn’t necessarily a friendly environment, and I don’t think it suits everyone. But if you’ve thought through every step and every detail, and it all fits together logically, your SOP and PS will be very strong, and you’ll also have fully thought through why you want to go abroad. In my case, I started by writing about how I felt a bit lost while doing experiments and didn’t know why I was studying this subject. Then I went out and explored: maker projects, startups and some clinical inspiration. That made me recall my motivation, and then go back to why I’d raised those questions in the first place. When I laid out that structure, it was simply because that’s how I actually thought about it. Why not just write it the way it’s structured in my head? So I did, and in the end it read as very strong!

J: I completely agree! Writing these essays really means digging through your past experiences and finding the connection between your past stories and your future. Go through your resume and find what actually sparked your motivation or passion to study abroad, and make sure you’re genuinely interested in the field! That’s what convinces the admissions committee to admit you. I think writing forces you to keep thinking, which is great training, because you can’t fool anyone with this!

D: Yes, exactly! So don’t hire an agency (no, I’m not just saying that). Agencies aren’t necessarily that good, based on what I’ve heard from people around me. Sorry for jumping in, but your goals are different. The agency wants to take your money first and complete the job. It’s task-driven: roughly meet your needs, do the minimum, and finish its task. Your goal is to make your application documents as good as possible, not just finish the task. It’s like a general-education group report where you want it to be top-notch and the other person just wants to pass. With that gap, disagreements are completely normal, so I don’t think you need to rely on an agency that much.

J: I strongly agree too!

Startup experience and YEF EPOCH: the Epoch Foundation’s Young Entrepreneurs program

J: Next, Danny, I’d like to talk about something I’m especially curious about: your startup experience. Could you tell us about joining the Epoch Foundation’s YEF Young Entrepreneurs program, and how you won first place?

D: It wasn’t really first place; they don’t rank first place that deliberately. But we were among the top teams. It’s a very special program, a bit like an awakening. If any listeners are university students, I really recommend giving it a try, because it takes you out of your usual track. Whether you study engineering or business, you need hands-on practice, and it pushes you out of your comfort zone. They first select a little over a hundred people, people with more of the right mindset, and bring them together at gatherings where you get to know each other and form teams of seven to nine to build out a topic. The topic might be a startup idea; it’s startup-oriented. The whole process is pretty tough. You’re a university student with zero experience, and you’re forced to do all this, so your mindset improves a lot and you become much more proactive. You were passive before. Coming up from high school, you mostly absorbed information passively, like learning whatever the department offered. Once you shift that perspective, you start thinking you can take back some control over your learning and your actions. You actually work professionally with lots of people, do your own Team Building and Tech Development, and think about how to do better in every decision, so your problem solving gets really good. So I recommend the Epoch Foundation’s YEF program. They recruit people every year. To me it was like an awakening for my thinking, so I really recommend it!

The U-Start program and the startup

J: Got it! You then joined the government’s U-Start program, which meant officially registering a company and starting the business. Could you tell us about your company: what the product does and who your main target customers are?

D: Our company (this isn’t a sponsored plug, since we haven’t launched to the public yet) mainly wants to take Raw Text Data. Imagine you’re reading a paper or an article someone wrote, and the logic isn’t very tight. How do you quickly grab the key points? You’d start asking questions. We want to use automation to turn it into a more Logical Mind Map. For example, picture pasting the raw text on the left, and on the right it turns into a very logical mind map. The mind map is made of nodes and follows a logical flow. Each topic has a top-down hierarchy, and each level carries different points and logic. If it can map out that logic automatically, it makes understanding much more efficient. We built the front end, the back end and the model buildup ourselves, and it took quite a while, so once it launches you can give it a try!

Founder, CEO and AI Engineer: how did you handle the AI Engineer role, and where did you learn the skills?

J: One more question. Danny, at this company you’re the Founder, the CEO and also an AI Engineer. How did you handle the AI Engineer role, and where did you learn the skills for it?

D: Oh, right! Those titles come up because you wrote the interview outline from my CV, so it sounds a bit grand. There are a lot of really strong AI Engineers out there, and I’m not one of them; I didn’t even major in CS. I say AI Engineer because our whole model is an AI, and we need ML, so you have to teach yourself a lot of NLP and fill in whatever knowledge you need. I had some ML knowledge, but it was related to CV, Computer Vision. NLP was a completely new concept to me. When you really want to do something, you go all in on learning it. You look for all kinds of resources, and there are so many online, and you find relevant teachers, or any teacher you can ask.

D: Then you slowly build up the model, look up literature and read journals. It goes back to the idea of research. In industry, if you’re not a regular engineer but a Research Engineer exploring the most advanced work in the field, you have to switch back to a research perspective, go through journals every day, and look for more possibilities. That’s part of why people say research matters so much lately: in industry, you need it if you want to do more problem solving and explore what’s possible next.

D: The whole research process is something you have to learn, so again it goes back to that research approach. Of course I only did part of it; I also brought in some CS friends to work with me. As for the process, the channels and how to learn the skills, in short: gather resources and use any channel you can, online and offline. Then find a mentor, which is really important, so you can ask questions and get feedback, negative or positive. Then keep iterating quickly. I think that’s how tech works, and it’s a good mindset to have.

J: OK, OK, I completely agree with everything Danny just said! Let me add a little. I’m also running OfferLand, a forum for studying abroad and careers. Everything Danny mentioned applies there too: gathering resources, using any channel to find people, resources or knowledge you can reach out to, then finding a mentor to get feedback. All of that helps us improve, or learn a lot of skills, in a short time, and then keep iterating quickly. I’ve learned so much from this process!

Danny’s advice for university students and anyone planning to study abroad

D: A lot of people ask why they should go abroad at all. I think that question is especially important, both before you apply and once you’re planning to go. You need to carefully weigh whether studying abroad is really worth it. Is your resolve that strong? Picture yourself abroad: you don’t know anyone, the culture is different, and it may not be the ideal environment everyone imagines. Think through every possibility. Take your goal, for example. If you want to learn some basic ML, you might get that experience at a grad program at NTU, NTHU or NYCU. So ask whether going abroad gives you something you can’t get anywhere else.

D: If you think it through and the answer is yes, it’s well worth doing, and usually that feeling is very strong: you feel Taiwan may not have enough resources to satisfy what you want to do. Thinking about your own positioning is the part I think people overlook most in the whole application process, so think about what you actually want. The next step is gathering information. Everyone reads forum posts, of course, but you should think outside the box and find what everyone has in common, instead of just following the crowd. That overlap gives you the general principles. Collect them, work out a direction, and keep trying. You can reach out to all kinds of seniors and ask what they think, but each of them is a single case! So listen to lots of different views. And I’d say try not to use an agency, because once you’ve worked out your own direction and positioning, you probably won’t feel so lost.

D: A lot of people feel lost while they’re applying, which I find pretty striking.

J: So you should get the feeling lost out of the way first, and then apply?

D: Yes, exactly. When you’re lost enough, someone might say, “This program is great too, why don’t you just study CS? Everyone goes abroad for CS, why don’t you?” If you keep listening, you’ll hear that a lot; if you’re in engineering, about 80% of you will hear it. So first you need to know why you want to go abroad, why you’re spending this money, and whether Taiwan has an alternative. If it doesn’t, then it’s worth going! But think about what you really want to get out of it. Try to think all of this through first!

D: It’s fine if that’s in your own rough, everyday language. That’s a good way to think about it. My other piece of advice: don’t lock yourself into a fixed idea of what your abilities must be, or how things must go once you’re abroad. Both the opportunities and your thinking keep evolving! There’s no fixed goal or ability, so you’ll always be… you should stay very aware in daily life. When you see lots of opportunities, things you could do, project openings, just go try them!

D: Don’t drop something just because it might not match your goal. Once you’ve anchored your principles, be bold with trial and error. That’s how to do it! Don’t anchor your principles and then cut out the trying. I know it sounds a bit fake, but it really matters. It’s a process of being aware in your daily life: lots of trial and error to find what you like and don’t like, while collecting lots of information at the same time!

Where can listeners find Danny if they have questions?

J: If listeners want to ask Danny questions, where can they find you?

D: I’ll send you my LinkedIn, and you can put it in the podcast show notes.

That’s it for this episode. If you enjoyed it, please give me a five-star rating, leave a comment and share it. If there’s anything you’d like to discuss with me, or you’d like to be a guest, send a DM to my Instagram (Jason Career), and you might be picked for a podcast episode and “add a folder of your own”! See you next time! Bye-bye~