becoming a prosthetic technician

 Hi Jessica,

Ah, so many tough decisions to make during the last year in high school!  If you’re interested in prosthetics, yes, the obvious first choice would be to choose biomedical engineering, since you’ll need to know the engineering of how prosthetics work and also how it can interact/work with the human body.  Not to make the decision tougher for you, but depending on the exact type of prosthetic, it may actually be more useful to choose a “traditional” engineering discipline.  The really important thing here is choosing the school that has a professor/lab that puts an emphasis on prosthetics research, rather than the exact engineering discipline.  For example, a professor in mechanical engineering may focus on the structures of a limb prosthetic (like its shape, strength, material, etc.), while a professor in electrical/computer engineering would focus on how to transmit the nerve signals from the body to control the finer movements in a prosthetic hand or sending the signals from a prosthetic eye to the brain such that the patient actually can “see”. You also mentioned prosthetic “technician”.  Generally the difference between an engineer and a technician is that an engineer is more involved in design while a technician would carry out that design and turn it into a real product.  So in the sense of prosthetics the technician may be more concerned about how the prosthetic fits with the patient (e.g., is it comfortable and are all the pieces of the prosthetics in the right place) but the engineer would be focused on how to make the prosthetic do its functions (e.g., is the prosthetic doing what it's made to do, how to improve it for the specific patient).  All in all, I’ve never worked with prosthetics so my knowledge is very limited.  If you know what type of prosthetics you’re interested in (leg, hand, eye, etc.), google for a professor who does that research and try to apply to that school/department.  If you’ve already decided on a school, then look on the school’s website to find the professor that deals with prosthetics research, even if s/he is not in engineering (for example, in biology or neurology).  You can go a step further by emailing people in the lab to get a brief idea of what exactly they work on (e.g., programming the prosthetic, testing materials suitable for a prosthetic, how the human tissues interact with the prosthetic, how the human brain controls the prosthetic).  Once you’re in the school, you can also take the initiative to talk to the professor and try to shadow someone in the lab.  You can talk to the administrators in your own department to see if you can get some academic credit for doing that, but even if you can’t, it’s still a good learning opportunity.  Best of luck!