I'm currently in the middle of applying for graduate programs in [[Computational/Systems/Synthetic/Quantitative Biology]/Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering/B

I'm currently in the middle of applying for graduate programs in [[Computational/Systems/Synthetic/Quantitative Biology]/Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering/Bioinformatics/Biotechnology] and, after working in related fields for years and having combed through dozens of relevant departments, I couldn't tell you what any of those terms mean relative to another (or rather, for any of those terms, I could show you two important universities that seem to use them very differently.) They all indicate overlapping areas of a very poorly-defined space in between "normal" biology, computer science, and physical engineering (as well as several other fields.) Pragmatically, for a prospective student, it's a giant pain simply because it's hard to tell what a program bearing one of these names will actually teach you! Some "computational biology" programs will include wet-lab work, others will never let you near a pipette. Some bioengineering programs are almost purely physical-machines engineering; others use the word interchangeably with "bioinformatics." And so on. But somewhere in that mess is the future of biology, medicine, and probably some other things as well.