I personally never worked in the field, but I can share the advise other upperclassmen and advisors gave me. In my experience, landing an internship is not easy and from what I hear in some other fields may not be totally necessary. An upperclassmen told me that a BS in BME is quite valuable, so maybe for at least trying to get into industry, applying for a full-time job can save more time then trying to get an internship or co-op first. Since BME is considered a “jack-of-all-trades” the first job doesn’t even need to be directly related to what you want to end up doing. I would also say learn some programming. MATLAB is a great start, but it is limited to labs and not very practical for anything outside of data and signal processing. It doesn’t even really follow what other languages do in terms of syntax and design. Another good starter language to learn is Python since its close to what is used everywhere else and freshmen CS majors usually learn this as their first language. Once you know one kind language like Python or Java you’ll see that other languages like C++ are very similar and may even work practically the same except for a few nuances.