<p>Hello everyone! I've read somewhere that the Chemistry program in UCLA is not ACS certified and one must take certain classes to be hired as a chemist after receiving a Bachelor's degree. Does anyone have more information about this?</p>
<p>The ACS certification may come in to play if you apply for grad school though I doubt it. Otherwise companies could not care less about the ACS and their certification, as long as the university is reputable and regionally accredited. </p>
<p>In any case chemists are not hired with a Bachelor’s degree for the most part, chemical technicians are. The prospects of employment are so bad for chemistry grads (around 20% find decent employment) I’s focus on getting an internship in business or choosing a different major.</p>
That’s true not just at ucla but everywhere. And those “certain classes” are “earning a PhD”. Your employment prospects with an undergrad science degree are slim. The union card for work at a level above bottle-washing is a PhD, and the sad fact is there is a PhD glut (as 10 minutes web searching will show you) so even then jobs don’t exactly fall into your lap.
I recognize that the perspective here and on other websites is that “decent” chemistry jobs for bachelor’s chemistry hardly exist. That, however, was not my experience. I graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree (BA) in chemistry from UC Davis and after that never found any difficulty finding a permanent job in laboratories doing sample analysis. (An explanation for the discrepancy between my perception and others’ may lie in different definitions of “decent.” I had worked in numerous jobs that paid little more than minimum wage and were usually really hard work before I went to Davis, so to earn $16/hour after I graduated was simply delightful to me.)
It was also my experience that in the commercial analytical laboratories I worked in for much of my career that PhD chemists were less desired than bachelor’s degree chemists. In my particular region (northern California) there were more jobs in analytical chemical commercial labs than in synthesis, so there were few opportunities for PhD chemists.
In my 30-year chemistry career I have never encountered anyone in a job or an interview who brought up the issue of whether my or anyone else’s bachelor’s degree was ACS-accredited (though I have found many university chemistry departments to be concerned with it).
This perception is contrary to my experience. BUT I do have something to say about curriculum that is extremely important: Ensure that extensive hands-on work with GC, GCMS, ICP-MS and HPLC is included in your coursework before you graduate. Universities are practically oblivious to the importance of these in employment, but GC, GCMS and ICP-MS are integral to environmental laboratories, forensic laboratories use GCMS a lot, and HPLC is extensively used in pharmaceutical laboratories and much other analytical work. If you get very capable in operating a GCMS (gas chromatography/mass spectrometer), you don’t have to worry about getting a job at all (until word gets out how much of a job ticket that is - but, oddly, people are resistant to this fundamental tip.)