Fritz Vogel, ’24, grew up rock climbing, white-water rafting and mountain biking in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. These days, he finds himself scaling even greater challenges despite being far from the mountains he calls home.
Vogel, an electrical engineering major, matriculated as a cadet and is now part of The Citadel Bachelor’s – Clemson University Master’s Graduate Program. Through this partnership, undergraduate mechanical or electrical engineering students from The Citadel with at least 90 credit hours toward their bachelor’s degree have the opportunity to take graduate-level courses in bioengineering, reducing the time it takes to earn both degrees by applying graduate credits to both undergraduate and graduate program requirements.
Vogel is accelerating beyond the usual timeline of the program, taking as many as 23 credit hours in a single semester. Though now on the fast-track, Vogel’s path to biomedical engineering has been anything but straightforward. After participating in the Clemson-Medical University of South Carolina AI Hub, a joint effort to explore the potential of artificial intelligence as it applied to biomedical research, Vogel switched from mechanical to electrical engineering and began pursuing research opportunities in the medical field, with plans to attend medical school after completing the master’s program.
“Bioengineering bridges the gap between my undergraduate background and my career ambitions,” said Vogel. “As a doctor, I want to be able to solve medical problems with my engineering expertise. A lot of doctors are good at the surgeries they perform, but they don’t know how to make a surgical apparatus that can push the field forward. If equipment fails during surgery, I would be better prepared to handle it.” For three days a week in the spring semester, Vogel rode his bike to the Clemson bioengineering campus at MUSC, where he assisted Clemson professor Yongren Wu, Ph.D., in his orthopedic research, labeling MRI images and assisting Ph.D. students with their research on osteoarthritis.
“Learning testing procedures and how to use lab equipment,” said Vogel, “will help me with anything I pursue in the bioengineering field.”
As Vogel continues to pursue graduate-level coursework in the hope of one day joining the surgical field, one thing is certain—this cadet is climbing to new heights.