Any current ENMED students can kindly comment how difficult it is to do medical school course work with requirements of engineering degree at the same time and do u have to have basic engineering degree to succeed in ENMED program
Current EnMed M3 so would love to comment on this briefly!
I'll address your second point first, you don't need a lot of hard engineering skills to be successful in EnMed. The focus of the program is mostly built around developing the skills of identifying clinical needs, brainstorming solutions, making prototypes, and making sure the final device could be viable in the market. So if you are like me and got to differential equations/linear algebra and found out you didn't like math as much as you thought, don't worry, there aren't classes like that in EnMed! They also have workshops and teaching sessions available for students who want to get better at solidworks, coding, soldering, machining, etc. Peer-teaching is also encouraged. Most projects are in groups, so chances are someone in the group will be good at whatever skill y'all need for the project and the team can play to their strengths.
As far as the workload, the general structure of the program is that during your pre-clerkship years you take one engineering course per semester that tries to blend in with whatever medicine classes you have going on. The lectures focus on technologies/devices and also focus on different aspects of the biodesign process. Throughout these courses, you usually work in teams on semester-long projects that have a final deliverable at the end that could be a business plan, a prototype, or something similar. This sounds like a lot, but the faculty are all aware of the demands of medical school, so they formulate the schedule so that you don't have any engineering commitments due on the weeks of exams (sometimes they accidentally schedule things, but they are always flexible with the due dates in those cases). In total, engineering has one lecture per week and takes about 2-3 hours of work per week on average to dedicated towards the engineering projects. This is made more manageable by the fact that EnMed structures their entire pre-clerkship around flipped classroom, so you don't have a lot of time commitments or in person mandatory sessions. The framework for the schedule is to have no more than 15 hours of mandatory session per week for most courses, and 20 hours per week for lab-based courses.
Throughout your 4 years of medical school, you also take 3, 4-week electives dedicated towards engineering projects. The summer after M1 year has a 10 week summer, so most students do their first 1 at that time and the remaining 2 can be done during M3/M4 year. These electives can be basically whatever you make of them, but they typically revolve around students working on solving a specific engineering problem. As an example, a surgeon from a nearby hospital came to EnMed with a problem he was noticing during surgeries, so my group signed up for the problem and worked on brainstorming/rapid prototyping during our engineering elective.
This was a very drawn-out explanation, but the TLDR is that the workload is very manageable and EnMed focuses more on the practical aspects of engineering instead of the math/concept heavy focus of undergraduate engineering!
