Behind the song · careers · biomed · clinical-engineering
So, What Do You Do? The Joke Every Biomed Knows by Heart
A Broadway-style opening number turns the oldest small-talk tangle in the field, biomed versus biomedical engineer versus clinical engineer, into one big chorus.
In short
- The song turns a real, common mix-up, confusing a biomedical equipment technician with a biomedical engineer, into a Broadway-style chorus.
- A national survey of practitioners was used to formally draw the scope-of-practice line between clinical engineers and biomedical equipment technicians.
- That same survey work fed into how the field's engineering-level certification exam is designed.
Every biomed has had this conversation at a dinner party. Someone asks what you do, and the honest answer needs a paragraph: not quite the person who draws the device on a screen, not quite the person the manual calls a clinical engineer, definitely not the person guessing at a stethoscope joke. "So, What Do You Do?" turns that exact tangle into a Broadway opening number, brass stabs and all, and resolves it the only way the field ever actually does: with a shrug and a chorus. It's a small joke with a real point underneath it.
Where the song came from
The idea is built around a genuinely old source of confusion, one common enough that the field's own trade press runs a recurring explainer just to untangle it: outsiders, and sometimes other healthcare staff, routinely mix up a hands-on biomedical equipment technician with a biomedical engineer, even though the two are different jobs that happen to share most of a name. The confusion isn't limited to strangers at a party, either; it shows up inside hospitals too, among staff who assume the person servicing their equipment must hold an engineering degree by default. The song's opening verse leans straight into that mix-up, giving the narrator a chorus of near-identical titles and one crowded answer to hand back.
I'm not the engineer who draws it on a screen,I fix the one you're not supposed to open, in between.There's a clinical version and a biomed too,one crowded title, we're all cousins, it's true!
A line that got drawn on purpose
The second verse points at something more official than a party joke. A national survey of practitioners was used to draw the actual scope-of-practice line between clinical engineers and biomedical equipment technicians, work that fed directly into how the engineering-level certification exam for the field gets designed. That kind of formal line-drawing is unusual outside licensed professions, and it is part of why the field takes its own titles more seriously than the joke lets on, even while it's laughing at itself. That is what the song means by "a survey once asked us to draw the whole line, who does the wiring, and who does the design": the field really did sit down and formally sort out who does what, and the honest answer was still "we're all cousins."
A survey once asked us to draw the whole line,who does the wiring, and who does the design.They needed the answer for a test down the hall,turns out we're all cousins, no wonder we stall!
That is the joke the whole song rides on: even the people whose job it is to define the boundaries between these titles keep landing back on "cousins." The bridge shortcuts the whole debate with the line everyone in the field actually uses at a party, "just say the tech, and we'll answer the same," which is less a punchline than a field-tested fact about how this conversation always ends anyway. Whatever the letterhead says, the chorus insists on the only detail that actually matters to the person waiting on a fix: pick any door, and someone on the other side of it will still show up.
