<p>I'm currently still a senior in high school. I applied to a couple of colleges, etc but now I'm just wanting for the acceptance letter from Grove School of Engineering in City College, which is the one I really want to get into. I was surfing through all the Chemical Engineering threads here. I read some posts saying that Chemical Engineering is a pretty complicated major.** Is this major really that hard? **</p>
<p>I mean if I were to rate myself from 1-10 in terms of intelligence and by no means am I trying to boast myself, I would probably got for a 7. I'm just really paranoid because people were saying that this major is really hard and some were saying that it's easy. I just want to know what you guys think. </p>
<p>Aside from how hard this major is, what about its job outlook? People were also saying that it's pretty hard to find jobs in this field but some were saying that many oil companies nowadays are hiring a lot of chemical engineers. I mean I know the difference between having a bachelor's degree and a master's degree. Obviously, I'm going to aim for master's. But would I be able to find decent jobs with just bachelor's? Because I want to earn money and be able to pay the tuition for my master's. And also, how long do you think it will take me to receive my master's? </p>
<p>Hate to break it to you any engineering major is going to be hard. ChemE does have some notoriously hard classes such as thermo, kinetics, and control theory but as long as you put enough effort and dont fall behind you’ll be fine. </p>
<p>Outlook is fine, ChemE is a very diverse field and you can find yourself doing everything from oil to consumer goods to finance. A bachelors degree is suffice for 99% of the jobs as long as they are academia based. If all you want is a terminal masters than find a company that will pay for it, and it usually takes about a year for a non-thesis masters and two years for a thesis masters.</p>
<p>My GPA is around 3.7. My SAT score is 1820. I took AP Chemistry and currently I am taking AP Calculus and AP Physics. I scored a 4 on the AP Chemistry. Judging from my academics here, do you think I will be able to handle those “hard classes”</p>
<p>And what is non-thesis and thesis master’s?</p>
<p>A non-thesis MS (traditionally called a professional master’s degree) is course-work only. Usually you take and pass 10 classes then get a degree. A thesis-based MS is a research-based degree where you take some classes (usually 6) and work on a research paper in addition to the classes. Your degree depends on passing the classes then successfully writing and defending your research to the faculty. </p>
<p>A professional MS usually takes 1 year, while a thesis-based MS usually takes 2 years. A thesis-based MS is preferred for those seeking a position in research or a PhD program, while a professional MS is fine for everyone else.</p>
<p>ChemE is difficult- I was top 2% my class, 36 on the ACT, and had a bunch of awards in high school. My GPA is alright (good compared to other ChemEs) but it could be better.</p>
<p>It’s not super difficult. It just takes decent time management skills since you have to study quite a bit on top of completing a lot of homework and projects. You also need to have a pretty good imagination in that a lot of phenomena are produced to you as equations and it’s up to you to “see” what is actually occurring.</p>