Successful cell biologist. Never directly used calculus, which is good because I sucked at it.
I’m sure that I’ve used it indirectly when figuring out areas under the curve. However, by “figuring out areas under the curve”, I mean putting the numbers into Graphpad Prism and letting the software do it for me.
I will say this: it’d be a lot easier to pick up science courses later in a piecemeal fashion, or to teach yourself, than to pick up calculus. I never had anything past college algebra, really, and now, for a variety of reasons, would really love to take calculus. However, finding a way to fit in a consistent series of math courses while working/raising a family is damn near impossible, and teaching myself is daunting.
I’ve been a med tech (medical laboratory scientist, now… they keep changing the title) for 7 years now and I’ve never had to pull out any calculus. I don’t need to do very much math at all, besides solution chemistry and dilutions. There’s some statistics, but for the most part it’s been more about understanding how to apply QC stuff like Westgard rules than about doing real statistical calculations on a bunch of data. I wish I’d done more statistics courses, so I could branch out a little into Quality stuff, but my basic knowledge has been more than sufficient for my current career.
Most of the math I do involves looking up a calculation in an SOP and knowing how to apply it. You don’t really need to understand what you’re doing, which makes me a little nervous - I understand the math and chemistry behind the equations I’m using, but some of my colleagues don’t, so it’s not obvious to them when something looks wrong. If you’re in a lab, you need a good solid understanding of basic math and biochemistry (depending on the lab), but you can probably skip the calculus.
Also, some areas of the clinical lab use more math than others, so depending where you want to go, you may use almost none of the math that you’ve already learned.
Thanks Antigen. I was hoping you’d pop in.
PM me anytime. Didn’t I give you my email at some point?
I think you did but I was much more positive that I was going to grad school back then.
Once I actually returned to school though, I realized that I really don’t want to be doing this for the next 5-6 years so I started thinking about my other choices, one of them being your job. Well, not your job. You know what I mean. 
I never “use” calculus, but understanding why it exists and is of use in certain situations is important.
Manda JO, I highly recommend you try the Khan Academy lecture series on calculus. He does a fantastic job of explaining the subject lucidly. It ended up becoming my surrogate for actually going to lecture bekoz I cood not anderstend my enchent Germen eenstrahktor.
No. I use some organic chemistry, analytical chemistry and some biochemistry but that is all I’ve ever actually used from my degree, as far as I can tell. Didn’t use the math, physics, pchem, etc.
Interesting thread. I don’t work anywhere near biomedical things (although my second career goal is to write embedded software for biomedical technology), but you know how people used to say “learning latin teaches you how to think?”
Maybe, but so does calculus. I do recall using at least first and second derivatives in interpreting results from general chemistry labs – certainly my lab partner and I had a leg up knowing what the fancy stuff was all about.
Again, not an expert, nor a professional – just a lowly student, but if you need some electives, I say take as many of the first-year sequence as you can. If for no other reason than it’s just fun, and it wll help you with the physics you take, I think – even if you take a sequence where no calculus is required (pace Phil Collins!).
No. Virtually useless to me, and unnecessary.
Interesting. You do have to admit that, historically, studying at least the evolution of the concepts of calculus gives a nice thread of continuity on which to hang your hat.
At least I find historical perspectives can be pretty illuminating, in that they can help organize data in a narrative fashion – working pretty much like a mnemonic – in addition to giving a good understanding of the history of ideas in general.
Since a of of professionals have mentioned understanding the concepts behind calculus, there’s a pretty good book, published by Dover…something like /the history of …/ sorry, I can’t remember the title. It has a yellow cover, though! I would stay away from Berlinski’s /a tour of the calculus/ – at least I didn’t find anything very interesting there.
+1 to the khan videos – I watched them when gearing up to try to consolidate my knowledge. Very, very good. The work on limits is pretty thin, which is kind of too bad – that’s really the core of calculus, at least in terms of philosophical big ideas. But you will learn all the basics from khan, certainly, at least from what I’ve seen.
Even a field biologist might want to understand the predator/prey population equations that explain (in terms of complex eigenvalues) why they oscillate. Even if you don’t have to derive them, you might wonder where they came from. When I taught math for biologists, I did only a bit of calc, but did show where that equation comes from (although I didn’t derive it).