<p>MSE isn't necessarily a subfield of chemistry; I'd only say that's true if you're in polymers or possibly some kinds of ceramics. If you're doing work with metals or electronic materials you'll definitely be closed to the Applied Physics end of the spectrum than the Chemistry side. If you're doing ab-initio calculations (like computer modeling), then it depends what you're interested in studying as to whose modeling techniques you'll use. If you're doing polymer chains, you'll use chemists' models; if you're doing atomic interactions between a few different kinds of atoms, you'll be doing physics models. If you're doing grain nucleation and growth, you'll be doing materials science models.</p>
<p>For materials, you're generally concerned with the length scales from 1nm up through 1m. We're mostly concerned about finding novel properties and devices from materials we study. It's often about engineering a material to be better than it initially is. Like, aluminum is great because it's so lightweight, but it's very weak. So, people figured out what they could mix with aluminum in order to make it a lot stronger (which is how we got materials like aircraft aluminum). They're also involved in designing new processes to make the materials which have been made in a lab. A MSE degree can let you do both materials science and materials engineering. As a comparison, you'd be able to do both what the chemist does (create new things in the lab) and what the ChemE does (scale it up into production sized batches), but with a single degree. The only difference is the types of materials you'll be dealing with.</p>
<p>As for what MSE students study, I'd recommend using Amazon's option to take a look inside this book: Amazon.com:</a> Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction: William D., Jr. Callister: Books
I've had a class on nearly every one of the chapters in that book. Here's a quick rundown on the classes I had as an undergrad.</p>
<p>Intro Materials: Used that book, as does nearly every other intro class out there. I still use it as my first reference book when I'm trying to learn something new.
Perfect Crystals: Learning about the fundamental symmetry in all crystalline solids, why they exist, and how you can characterize them.
Defects in Materials: Vacancies, line defects, grain boundaries, and voids. All subjects most people outside of materials would never have heard of. They're the reason why materials aren't "perfect" and why we can get so many fantastic properties. In some cases, we want no defects (single-crystal silicon wafers for semiconductor processing), and in other cases we want to fill our material with defects (cold-working a metal) in order to strengthen it.
Thermodynamics of Materials: What happens if there were infinite time, learning why you have phase changes and how to predict them. Preliminary stuff on heat engines and such, but not nearly what you'd fine in a MechE class.
Phase Diagrams: An extension of thermo, how to use thermodynamics to predict phase diagrams between mixtures of different materials, how to read more complex phase diagrams, how to predict the shape of nuclei during formation, and basic nucleation & growth theory.
Transport in Materials: Transport of heat and mass through a material. Paths that atoms/molecules can take through a material, and problems/benefits that arise from diffusion time.
Materials Selection: How to figure out the design constraints on a project and narrow down your material choices. Extensive use of Ashby maps so you can compare two properties between wide arrays of materials easily.
Microstructures I: Learning about what happens when you have different kinds of symmetry within crystals and the sorts of unique properties that can pop up. As in, you can only make piezoelectrics (from what powers those LA Lights sneakers to the actual creator of the PING sound used in sonar) out of materials with certain kinds of crystalline symmetry.
Senior Capstone Design: My group was given the task of determining if this company we were working with would be able to competitively enter the market for very thin sheets of copper. We had to design our own tests and obtain competitor samples to determine how their quality was versus the competition. Learned the realities of working with companies and how much they like to drag their feet on every. freaking. thing.</p>
<p>Electives:
Corrosion in Materials: Learning about corrosion in materials for the first half of the semester (electrochemistry stuff, plus the materials processing concerns such as the problems welds introduce and how temperature can effect the corrosion properties of a material). The second half was the opposite of corrosion, where we learned about batteries and how to engineer good materials for those.
Microstructures II: Pretty much took I had learned in the required courses and smashed it into one class. Didn't learn anything really new, but it gave me a much deeper understanding of how everything I learned tied together. Easily my favorite class. Our lab was one project that lasted the entire semester, and the instruction sheet we were given was around two sentences long. "You have 10 chunks of this steel, you have 10 chunks of that brass. Make the steel harder and the brass tougher." The final was one problem which took all of us over three hours to do. My most "real world" type of class.
Electrical, Magnetic, and Optical Properties of Materials: Learn about those different kinds of properties in materials, and why they occur. My class was taught pretty poorly, so we never even got out of the E part of EMOP. :(
Semiconductor Processing: How are giant single crystals of silicon made? How do you do chemical vapor deposition of gallium arsenide and grow single crystals? What sort of variables do you have to control while doing this processing, and what are your limits of errors (for example, how many line defects can you have per cubic centimeter of Si and still have it be good to make Pentium chips on)?
I also took extra thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and solid state physics classes in the physics department to fulfill some requirements. I regret not having taken a mechanics in materials course as well as the one on steel processing (I was away for the first week and a half of the semester, but the course was a mini, so I had missed way too much :().
I also did research on phase transformations in low-carbon steel, grain growth in thin-films, finding new magnetic materials for hard drives to be made from, and growing nanowires.</p>
<p>Right now I'm a grad student in MSE and I'm trying to create a new way of forming bulk amorphous alloys (metallic glasses).</p>
<p>As for who employs, I'd recommend checking schools for their post-graduation surveys. I know MIT publishes theirs, here's CMU's: <a href="http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/employ/salary/Materials.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/career/employ/salary/Materials.pdf</a> and I'm sure you can find such info for Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, UIUC, Michigan, Northwestern, and all the other schools big in materials.</p>
<p>Edit: Holy cow long post.</p>