<p>“Just a question, I thought that ChemE was more about reactor design than actual chemistry. Or is this just another myth?”</p>
<p>I was enrolled as a chemical engineer and switched to chemistry. The coursework is harder, but that wasn’t an issue because I was still pulling A’s. What made me switch was the content. We were learning all about mass transfer, fluid dynamics, and reactor design. This stuff is incredibly important, but not of interest to me. I’d rather learn about how instruments work, how to make important pharmacueticals, and what quantum theory is all about. So I switched…
But, both majors have enough overlap in the first few years so you can probably start out in either and switch after a few classes.</p>
<p>ChemE is all about large scale manufacturing. Chemists work on discovery, analysis, and small scale synthesis.</p>
<p>ChemE’s work with reactors, large scale manufacturing, process design and optimization etc. </p>
<p>I’d seriously consider going back to ChemE. Companies aren’t doing a lot of discovery now a days at least in the US. They are looking for ways to make things cheaper and more efficiently. Let’s see if we can squeeze more juice out of each orange, be able to package more products with a given amount of plastic etc.</p>
<p>In my internships and research experiences I have never even seen an NMR machine in real life. I’ve used IR, HPLC, GCMS <- these were for the required instrumental analysis lab, AFM, gel permeation chromatography, SEM, and dynamic light scattering <- these were for the elective materials engineering lab. If I went deeper into materials probably have to use Raman spectroscopy and XRD. But NMR? Well, its not worthless. It’s quite expensive actually. But it is not as useful as other instruments for the cost.</p>
<p>Chemical engineering works with reactors but also need the theoretical knowledge of chemistry behind them. However knowing the theoretical knowledge is not enough, you have to know how to actually carry them out and that’s what the engineering comes in.</p>
<p>NMR isn’t the greatest thing in the world but it does have some uses:
You can get much better data for solid proteins. A lot more research is going into structural biology and getting protein’s to crystallize for XRD seems to becoming more difficult.
NMR’s are also used heavily by organic chemists. They’re a quick and powerful way to show what exactly is in your solution.</p>
<p>Students who are not prepared for grad school in chemistry but still get in generally don’t last. I can’t even count the number of people I’ve known who put in a semester, a year, or two years, and then quit. Generally speaking, the reason they didn’t do that well as an undergraduate is that they really just weren’t that interested.</p>
<p>Yes, grad school comes with health insurance. PI’s pay for students on Research Assistantships, but the department pays for grad students on TA. Chemistry is generally about discovering new knowledge, synthesizing new compounds, etc. Engineering is about using knowledge we already have, but in better ways (making things faster, cheaper, better). Typically in corporate America, chemical research is an ongoing financial drain in hopes of a future payoff, but engineering is about saving money and increasing profits right now. Engineering does a lot more mathematical modeling and also pays better, especially at the B.S. level. When the economy comes back, engineering jobs will be among the first to return.</p>
<p>How risky is the scientific research career though? Let’s say you’re Ph.D in Chem whose research project went really unsuccessfully and yielded almost no result. Do you still get research grants? Or do you always get paid salary by the school/company anyway?</p>
<p>In a Ph. D. program if you don’t yeild something presentable and usually published you probably won’t graduate at all. Such people often take the MS and leave. Graduation rates are from 25-75% depending more on your PI and whether he gives you mentor-ship and a viable project rather than just uses you as a lab tech. I was in a program that was the later and he had ~a 70% dropout rate that he rationalized to himself as survival of the fittest.</p>
<p>At the Ph. D. level if you go on an academic track you have to be outstanding to even have the possibility of getting a tenure track position otherwise you might not even get a crappy post-doc. Not to mention you may only get a job in Wyoming.</p>
<p>In Industry there aren’t that many Ph. D level jobs (less now that pharma is in the gutter) and it is very difficult to transition from academia to industry. Most of the jobs are at the MS/BS level and frankly they are mostly total crap temp lab serf jobs running samples all day long and making less than a garbage man. There are some product development jobs however, getting the specialized experience needed to get hired into one is nearly impossible.</p>
<p>And a lot of terrible quality control jobs where yes, you run the same samples over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again…</p>
<p>Or you could get a job at a CRO, where it is high pressure, 10 hr work days are the norm, and your company’s boss has a catalog of compounds for sale that he has no idea how to make efficiently on a large scale. Most likely a temp position too. </p>
<p>Go look around linked in for people that have ‘chemist’ as a profession and see how many temp jobs, or number of jobs that they’ve had in the past 10 years. I guarantee the vast majority of people you’ll find have probably had 3 or 4 different jobs in the past 10 years. How can you expect to settle down and own a house or raise a family if you’re constantly struggling to hold down a job in the same location for more than just 2 or 3 years?</p>
What objective data? The crap put out by the ACS? Even their studies show nearly 20% flat out unemployment of chem grads and the only reason it is not higher than that is most of the grads are “persuing further studies”, working part time, or have some low paying job in academia. </p>
<p>The BLS study that indicates fast growth of biology positions (career prospects grow from completely hopeless to doubtful).</p>
<p>ACS are scam artists that should stop artificially pumping up employment stats for chemists by digging deeper and publishing real employment figures like U-6 numbers. I’d hardly call jumping around from post doc to post doc and from QC temp job to QC temp job being gainfully employed.</p>
<p>Are there really people out there that go into chemistry for the money anyway? Do people really think “I’m gonna become a chemist and make bank!”?
It seems like the people who like chemistry enough to study it in the first place wouldn’t really care about salary/jobs.</p>
<p>No people don’t go into chemistry expecting to make bank, they do, however, go into chemistry expecting to at least be able to make a living, especially when it can cost in excess of $30k in student loan debt. Jobs better than being stuck as a permatemp chemist or QC/analytical drone: plumber, carpenter, electrician, elevator repairman, aircraft mechanic, hell even a trash collector, at least they get to work outdoors and have no student loan debt.</p>
<p>Actually a lot of people have the mistaken impression that “humanities / social studies => no job, while science / engineering => job”. I would not be surprised if the “sour gripes” type of posters with chemistry and biology degrees believed or were told that before deciding their major, and did not look at university career surveys on the subject. (Someone who likes chemistry but sees the career surveys might choose chemical engineering instead.)</p>
<p>The career surveys indicate that job and career prospects are significantly better for most engineering, math, statistics, computer science, and physics than for chemistry and biology, probably due to the flood of pre-meds who did not get into medical school looking for chemistry and biology jobs. But note that many of the physics graduates do not actually get physics jobs; they often get (decently paying) jobs in other fields like finance or computer software due to their math abilities. Of course, economic cycles and industry-specific economic cycles can have a significant effect on job and career prospects (compare civil engineering in 2005 versus 2009).</p>
Strange, for me it’s always been “engineering / business => job, science => professional school / no job, humanities / social studies => law school / no job”. It makes sense, since at my university (and many others), “engineering” and “business” have their own colleges, whereas “liberal arts and sciences” are lumped in together, with equal career prospects.</p>
<p>What school do you go to? Physical sciences has their own school here. School of Physical Sciences. Chemistry, Math and Physics.</p>
<p>The bio department is exiled to School of Biological Sciences. The concentration camp for premed losers.</p>
<p>Business, good for employment? Who will hire a business major to manage anyone straight out of college? Can they manage someone? Will anyone listen to them “manage” with no experience? You think standard business majors can do real business analysis? A chem major can do that better than the standard business major because they know far more math and programming. Actual business administration undergrads from non-Ivy schools aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.</p>
<p>Of course no one is going to hire a fresh college grad for management. You need experience for that. You sound like you’re specifically talking about Management major/concentration. Business majors like Accounting or Finance still fare much better than Chemistry.</p>
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<p>Doesn’t matter. Business majors take math and programming courses as well just enough for job market. Unless the chem majors obtain MBA, become an actuary or work in technical sales or investment banking I don’t think majority of the employers will hire chem majors for business jobs. It’s from my own experience :(</p>
<p>gravenewworld, Based on this and previous, similar comments you’ve made on other posts, it’s pretty clear you haven’t actually worked in an of these fields. (Same to those others who are constantly saying working as a janitor or garbage man would be better than being a chemist…) These jobs are tough. My dh would love to tell you about the time he had to crawl through spider infested crawl spaces, dripping with sweat, just hoping he didn’t encounter a snake, only to have raw sewage drip on him as he was repairing a plumbing problem. Oh, and I think he was getting paid about $10 and hour to have all that fun. I remind him of that one sometimes when he starts complaining about his current job as a commercial pilot - which has it’s own tales of horror, I might add. Not all plumbers, electricians and carpenters have it made. Most are self-employed, never knowing where the next job will come from - paying extremely high self-employment taxes, having no benefits (try pricing health insurance on your own) and no regular income. Working outside? When the weather is pleasant, sure. What about when it’s 20 below zero and the wind is blowing hard? Or 98 degrees in the full sun with high humidity? Try laying block for a couple of days. Oh, and if you get injured, you’re out of work with no income. My dh’s uncle fell from a roof he was working on and was a paralyzed and confined to a bed for the rest of his life. And even if you don’t have a disabling injury, there’s only so long a body can take that hard physical labor. EVERY job has its negatives and drawbacks.</p>