Molecular Engineering Job Prospects

Hi, I am currently torn about the University of Chicago. I was admitted EA, and I love the school. My hesitation comes from the fact that all other schools I was admitted to have regulation engineering schools and I would probably study mechanical engineering at them. At UChicago they only have Molecular Engineering. This seems like a very interesting field and I am sure I would enjoy studying it. I am worried however, because it is such a new, and unheard of discipline and program, the job prospects after graduation might not be as good as a regulation mechanical engineering degree from somewhere else.

I am really interested in international policies and was an active member of my school’s Model United Nations club. My plan at UChicago would be to Major (or possibly minor if I could not fit a major) in Molecular Engineering and Global Studies. I would love to work in some field that involved the application of new technologies on the global scale and how those technologies affect different economies and policies. Especially if I was to do the Bio track of Molecular Engineering, I would be interested in how nanotechnology affects things like crop growth and food supplies worldwide.

I guess I am just looking for someone to assure me that there is a job market out there for that, and that a molecular engineering degree from UChicago would be useful and worth the time and money. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated! Thanks you!

The Facebook page for Molecular Engineering says this of the undergraduates who graduated in 2019:

“Of the 28 undergraduates, many are moving on to pursue PhD programs at schools including University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, Stanford, and University of Washington.”

That is, the program is taken seriously by top level engineering programs, which simply consider you to be a graduate of a top university.

This news release mentions industry and consulting:

https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/pme-graduates-celebrate-success-during-convocation

And the Instagram page mentions awards…

“Maritha Ann Wang, an undergraduate student in Prof. Jiwoong Park’s group, has received a prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, which recognizes and supports outstanding students in STEM fields with a three-year annual stipend. Maritha Ann’s research focuses on developing textured 2-D materials for use in flexible and foldable electronic devices. Congratulations, Maritha Ann!”

PME is the most innovative engineering program around, and other universities and industry know it.

If you want to work as a mechanical engineer, you wont get there (not easily) with a degree from IME.

But is that what you really want? If you want to do economic policy “that involved the application of new technologies on the global scale” - that you can do from a degree from UChicago with as much of a chance or better with a UChicago degree. As a new grad, consulting companies engaged in policy, economics, politics, government, or international nonprofit will probably work as your first or “default” job. Masters/PhD after undergrad would work as your next step too.

Check out Booz and see which school they recruit for their government consulting work. (McKinsey and Bain or other smaller outfits may work out as well). Also check out their clients and see where their clients recruit.

A sampling of diverse organizations may also align with what you want to do long term depending on whether you view them positively or negatively: Blackwater, NIH, Lockheed Martin, Doctors without Borders, Gates foundation, SpaceX, Monsanto, Bayer… you probably want to research what they want from newbies and try to imagine yourself in that position

I know my DD who is in the IME program (3rd year) is looking at top schools for her PhD. Her friend who is a year ahead was just accepted to MIT for her post grad work. DD had had no issues getting internships since she was a 1st year. Having said all that if MechE is what you want UChicago is not your best bet, as you would have to get a Masters in MechE somewhere else. She also mentioned that the requirements for IME were increasing so a double major would be more difficult. She was suppose to go to USC (USoCal) to visit the engineering department this weekend (all expenses paid by USC) but that has been delayed until Fall due to COVID19. I think its actually advantageous to come from a small unique engineering program.

To translate from some of the above answers: The projected career paths of a mechanical engineering BSE from an ABET-accredited engineering program and a UChicago molecular engineering SB are very different. There is certainly some potential overlap if you look out 15-20 years into the future, but very, very little immediately following college graduation.

A BSE degree in mechanical engineering from an ABET-accredited engineering program qualifies you to be hired as an engineer by any of the hundreds of thousands of firms that employ millions of mechanical engineers world-wide. When you graduate, that’s almost certainly what you will do, at least for several years and probably more: work as an engineer for an engineering firm. If you can make it through the undergraduate program, as a practical matter you are basically assured of being able to get a job as an engineer somewhere, although the economy and your personal qualities and preferences may affect how many offers you can get and how good your pay and working conditions will be.

A molecular engineering degree from Chicago will not qualify you for employment as an engineer anywhere. You will be excluded from that market altogether, absent further education, and realistically, you are unlikely ever to work as an accredited engineer at a firm that does the sort of work accredited engineers do. You will be amply qualified to get admission to a PhD program, which may or may not be an engineering PhD, and which will put you in a position to do exciting, groundbreaking research in industry and academia some years in the future. That further education won’t cost you anything out-of-pocket, but it will defer fully reaping the rewards of your education.

It may also qualify you, depending on what else you have learned and what kind of person you are, to work in the financial/investment or business consulting worlds. There, you can get very well paid for being really smart and analytical, working very hard, and having enough basic knowledge in a tech field to understand the research other people are doing. You could also work in journalism covering such research and the businesses it spawns, possibly in sales for some of those businesses, or in government where they are regulated and often funded. You might work as a low-paid lab assistant for a year or two while you were deciding on or jumping through the hoops required to take your next step.

Or you may do something completely different. People who are really smart and who complete STEM degrees at elite universities like the University of Chicago don’t have trouble getting employed somewhere at a living wage unless they have overwhelming personal problems, because there are not enough people like that in the world and they are valuable. You might wind up as a lawyer, a doctor, an entrepreneur. But you will not have the neatly defined job market you can fit right into with hardly any friction or uncertainty that an actual BSE would provide.

By the way, if you had the BSE degree, you could probably do many/most of the things you might do with the molecular engineering degree, at least eventually, but you would have to swim against a pretty strong tide.

If you want to work as a professional engineer, there’s no substitute for a professional engineering degree. If you don’t want to work as a professional engineer, not being a professional engineer is a more direct route to achieving your goal.

Be careful about listening to self-proclaimed experts on the internet who are stuck in 1950. With a Molecular Engineering degree form UChicago, you will have options at the leading employers in the U.S. and top grad schools. You want to work at Google, not some Mom and Pop in Timbuktu. Check with IME directly for more information.

I believe that Mohn was referring to mechanical engineering in particular. I wonder if this is (or still is) a correct general characterization of the job prospects available to ME majors upon graduation, and how that might have changed given the new course requirements and further specialization opportunities via minor study. @Cu123?

http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/molecularengineering/

@JBStillFlying I will start with saying this statement is undoubtedly false. However I would generally agree with Mohn that IME is not the place you want to go for MechE/CivilE/AeroE (where accreditation/PE is more prevalent) or the more traditional engineering programs. It seems that most of my DD friends go directly into PhD programs (which is kind of the traditional UChicago student path for STEM). Job prospects are not an issue for those who don’t go on to academia as they are normally going to find there prospects quite good in the Pharma/ChemE/BioE areas. Still if someone wanted the liberal arts education UChicago offers, and an engineering degree in the traditional engineering programs, they would most likely have to pursue a MS which they will have no problem getting into a number of top universities. Personally it takes an unusual person who wants both a high end LA education, and an engineering degree that is competitive for top universities engineering PhD programs. So in the end if your looking for an MechE engineering degree to go right into industry (and a job), I wouldn’t think UChicago is a good fit.