I’ll probably pick one of the two for my college major (in the US, btw). I like the chem I’ve taken so far, but I just really don’t know which path to take. What are the main differences, and what are the career options? Any input from someone who had to make the same choice? Thanks.
[Moved to IMHO.]
Welcome to the boards, pandNH4. I’ve moved your thread to the In My Humble Opinion forum because I think that’s a better fit for it.
Right, sorry about that
I don’t have any specific comments since I was an Aero Eng. but I know that at my school Chem Eng. was a more intensive program than Chemistry. The Engineering program was something of a hybrid program that straddled the Engineering College and the Liberal Arts College and carried many of the requirements of both. The ChemE students had to fulfill all the Engineering school’s math requirements and various other prerequisites and had a very limited selection of free electives in a 152 credit hour program. The Chemistry majors had a much more flexible course load and only had to complete the standard 120 credit hours.
Of course, any employer should know that the ChemE curriculum is an intense one as that should offer more career opportunities with a higher initial salary. In theory a Chemist is going to be working in a more academic/research oriented type of field while the ChemE will be working in a more practical, real-world environment. Personally I like the Engineering aspect due to the fact that your work has a more immediate conclusion and tangible result.
I might be your man, as I have a degree in both (although I use neither). It really depends what you’re looking for in a career. Chemical Engineering jobs pay better, but that was a trap that I fell into and didn’t like the jobs I got from it. Like most engineering degrees, it’s interchangeable to a certain extent with others, depending on your field (ie, there’s lot of crossover with geological and mechanical engineering jobs, or even biomedical). You will mostly likely end up in a project/process engineer career path after spending some time in the field, again, depending on your career sector. I spent most of my time in the oil & gas and water sectors, and there’s lots of on-site learning to do there before you actually know how to do anything.
Note that learning engineering is much different than actually practicing engineering. Your classes are there to give you background knowledge, but most of the things you’ll actually need to know for your job will be employer specific (unless you’re a genius). Engineering college is a tool to enable to think in a certain way, very problem/task oriented kind of thinking.
As for the classes, prepare for a lot of math. I mean a lot. Chemistry as it relates to chemical engineering kind of fades away by your second year of classes, and it’s more about manipulating product streams and calculating heat transfer (actually my favourite classes, but I’m strange), combined with a lot of purely empirical stuff. Linear algebra aka “magic math” was the bane of my third year.
My chemistry degree was a bit more of “that’s interesting” degree, and I never particularly used it before I left engineering entirely. Experiences may vary, but my guess is that you’d want at least a Masters or even a PhD if you wanted to do more than be a lab jockey. Not that lab work wasn’t interesting, and often it could be, but my sense of the industry is that it’s a lot of the same thing every day. You do get to do a lot of problem solving here too - one of the more satisfying things of my career was a lot more related to chemistry problem solving than engineering problem solving, in that I recreated a chemical test kit from scratch without having the instructions.
Upper level chem courses are fascinating, BTW, though higher level organic courses have a well deserved hellish reputation, requiring tons of memorization. Higher level phys chem courses get into quantum mechanics, which is about the coolest thing chem students get to take, IMO.
engineers almost always make more money than straight chemists
A guy I knew back in college started out in chemical engineering, but found that it didn’t actually involve much chemistry. So he switched to chemistry and lived happily ever after.
There is no dissagreement from me that the course load for undergraduate ChemE is more intensive than just a chemistry BS. A chemical engineer will likely have less competition when looking for a job and will also get paid more. A BS degree in chemistry just isn’t worth much. If you want to be out of school in four or five years and making money there is no question you have to go Chemical Engineering.
What you choose depends on what type of person you are. I am not at all the engineer type. I want to explore and try things on a whim. I could never do what engineers do. On the other hand, I had no problem spending an extra five years in school earning a PhD then postdocing. It is a little known secret that grad school in the hard sciences is not only free, but you get paid a pittance to do it. Even PhD though, the kind of money you make once out of school depends a lot on what your focus is. If your a synthetic medicinal chemist the competition for jobs is tight, but the perks and salary are enormous. If your a solid state chemist, your job will get paid similar to a highly paid engineer. You can always go the professor rout, but once again the competition is tight. Also professors don’t make tons of money unless your ivy league, but the perks are even better considering you literally can play with whatever you want provided you keep the funding coming. An analytical PhD is highly desirable but really boring IMO. In one way or another most chemists end up in materials chemistry of some form.
Another secret is that as an undergraduate major in chemistry, as long as you aren’t failing out, you can pretty much ask any research profesor for a job and they’ll give it to you. While the Chem E curriculum is tougher, a chemistry degree is whatever you make of it. If you come out of an undergrad program with several years working for a professor and even mediocre grades you will be in really good shape. I had two undergrads work for me when I was in grad school. One was pretty bright even though not a super worker. He went to Princeton. The other was a complete waste and he ended up working for a big name guy I think at Irvine. Also, working in a lab is fun.
My undergrad is in Chemical Engineering. Out of highschool I chose it based on the fact that I wanted something practical and didn’t want to just do science or math. I really enjoyed chemistry . Not long into university I discovered I wanted to work in environmental consulting and went to grad school for environmental engineering. I never did any hardcore chemical engineering but it was a very useful background to have, more useful than Civil Engineering which is what most of my colleagues have.
Your future career options are a lot more open with an engineering degree than a science degree and you’d likely have to go to grad school to improve your options. It also pays better although I screwed up with this one by going into environmental engineering which is on the lower end of the engineering pay scale.
However, it really comes down to what ultrafilter said, you need to do what you enjoy. It’s easier to switch from chemical engineering to chemistry so maybe you want to start off that way, see how the first year or so goes and potentially transfer.
>found that it didn’t actually involve much chemistry
I think ultrafilter is right. Chemical engineering uses fluid mechanics and heat transfer and similar things, which don’t involve any chemistry per se at all, and also some things like the mechanics of polymers that sound sort of like chemistry and deal with molecules, but don’t actually concern themselves with atomic bonding. It also uses things that do involve chemistry, but not much. I’m a physicist and have studied a little mechanical engineering, and I work with many chemists and chemical engineers. A few times I’ve thought it might have been fun to choose chemical engineering, but have almost never felt much interest in chemistry (though the book Uncle Tungsten has made me much more fond of metals, if that counts).
Ice Machine raises a good point. Most people don’t discover what they really want to be doing until after they’ve enrolled in college (sadly not even after graduation oftentimes) so it always pays to choose a Major that has the most versatility. Typically an Engineering student can freely transfer into any college and major at his or her whim. It’s much, much more difficult to move from a LAS curriculum to anything with higher standards of acceptance. This logic applies after you graduate too. Most employers are eager to higher people with Engineering degrees to do almost anything under the sun because of the analytical nature of the process but lab sciences are often viewed as more restrictive and less adaptable to common business needs.
from personal experience, I tried to get just straight chemistry jobs after graduating with my engineering degree and I never even got interviews, because employers assumed I would leave them for an engineering job.
Just chimed in to say-- love your user name!!
I’d say this is true for an undergraduate degree, but once you go to grad school for chemistry, the options are enormous. Of course you will have to pick a feild and limit those options before you graduate, but you can do almost anything. There isn’t a single high tech industry that doesn’t use a PhD chemist someplace to do research.
Everything that a chemical engineer does was first done by a chemist. It’s actually one of the biggest sources of tension between the two careers. What a chemist does at the benchtop doesn’t always scale up well, and they assume that we know this. Of course it’s almost never the CE that solves the problem as most haven’t actually had that much chemistry. PhD’s in CE are another story.
But why would you even think you are qualified. As a CE, you aren’t a chemist, and you didn’t take all the chemistry courses that a chemist did. At my school, chemistry classes for engineers were always shorter in duration and covered less ground. Granted chemistry jobs at the BS level could often be done by a CE without trouble, but not all of them.
You are missing the point. Yes, almost every field of technology can use a chemist with a PhD. However you are still limited to doing chemistry. A ChemE can be considered for almost any role in a company, from an engineering job to a account management job to a business analyst job etc. An Engineering curriculum is very broad based and much more reliant on learning how to solve problems in the greater sense as opposed to memorizing chemical and molecular fundamentals and advances lab procedures. Low-tech businesses love bringing in engineers of any flavor to handle logistics and processes and MBA programs are particularly open to engineers. Lab Scientists have much more specific knowledge that isn’t perceived as universally useful.
You don’t know much about advanced chemistry do you? Memorizing may get you through the first semester of organic, but it won’t cut it anywhere else. Engineers are the ones that are taught to think within the box, that is precisely why they are so usefull to low-tech industry. Low-tech industry isn’t interested in developing a new technologies so they don’t need the out-of-the-box thinking. Engineers are useless for R&D unless it’s an engineering problem.
I got my bachelor’s in chemical engineering in 2004.
The chemistry background I got was quite strong. I was only 2 elective chemistry courses away from a double major in chemistry but I didn’t see much point to it.
If what you like is working in a lab, chemistry is a better fit. The chemical engineering side is often concerned with translating a particular operation that a chemist has performed in a lab (synthesis of a polymer, for example) into an industrial scale. So the engineer ends up working a lot more with mass and energy balances, separation operations and whatnot.
Engineering is usually dirtier than chemistry. Manufacturing environments are typically dirty and loud.
The personal interactions at work are also a bit different. Chemists typically work with management and other chemists. Engineers work with management, chemists and the plant operators. Trust me, there are very different dynamics between working with a PHD chemist and working with a union pipefitter. And yes, I do both daily ;D
I agree that the chemical engineering background gives you a much broader range of options. I disagree with this statement:
Lots of people in these roles have engineering backgrounds but you shouldn’t assume that fresh out of school with an engineering degree you are qualified (or will be hired) as say, a financial analyst. Typically what happens is that engineers will work for 5-10 years in a typical engineering job then get a secondary degree (MBA maybe) to branch out.
Myself? I took a process engineering internship (8 months) at a large manufacturing facility. I hated it. So I finished my degree and looked for something outside of the typical process engineering focus. Currently I’m working for a large chemical company (surprise). My job title doesn’t say much: “Technical Service Representative” but what I actually do day to day is pretty interesting (to me). My job is a hybrid - I do synthesis chemistry, I do product development, I do manufacturing support and I do sales support. So I was able to find something that was more interesting to me than the standard process engineering job.
What the hell are you arguing? YES. Chemists are the best if you want a career in R&D and a Lab. An Engineering degree is more versatile. You can go into many different job functions in many different fields. Being an Engineer is NOT what you want if you want to do Advanced Chemistry and R&D. No one has argued any differently.
The operative question in the OP is what are the differences between the two. They have been highlighted. Do you have any purpose other than trying to proselytize about the holiness that is a Chemistry degree to future Chemists? The OP never said he wanted to be a Chemist when he grew up so what purpose are you serving?
I agree with GameHat, here. Definitely there are more jobs for CE. Jobs for Chemists are very competative because they aren’t as common. The social dynamic is also very different. After I got my bachelors degree, I had an unusual job where I was a lab manager, did have employees, and also had to interact with the formen, but that was unusual. Typically, a chemist rarely leaves the lab. You get to know your lab workers very well and it can be a pretty tight group. Chemists tend to goof off more.
On the other hand, my father had his PhD in chemistry, but his title was engineer. So there there are ways to cross into engineering from chemistry.
Are you sure that it wasn’t a BA rather than a BS? A CE where I got my undergrad would never be able to do this. The classes weren’t transferable because the curriculum was very different. The physical chemistry lab was only one semester and engineers never had to take inorganic lab.