Chemistry or Chemical Engineering?

In My Humble Opinion
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[QUOTE=WarmNPrickly]

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.
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IIRC, the chemistry department at my Uni offered both BA and BS Chemistry degrees. I don’t recall too well which I was close to.

At least for my school, the Chem. Eng. chemistry curriculum was largely shared with chemistry majors. A typical class make-up for a core chemistry class (First semester organic chemistry, for example) would be 50% chem majors, 40% chem Es and 10% other.

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[QUOTE=WarmNPrickly]
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.
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I disagree with this. I don’t see (from my experience) as chemists are R&D, engineers are process.

Rather, what I see is that bachelor’s degrees are more process, masters and PHD are more R&D.

My current work group includes:

2 chem engineers with bachelor’s degrees
2 chemists with bachelor’s degrees
2 chemists with master’s degrees
1 PhD chemist
2 guys with materials science type degrees
3 technicians

One of the master’s degree chemists is the technology manager - 95% of his job is management.

The PhD and the other master’s chemist do probably 60% R&D, 40% manufacturing/process support

I myself (bachelor’s degree) do probably 40% R&D, 30% process support, 30% sales/tech service.

So there’s not necessarily a hard and fast division, but the advanced degrees do more pure R&D. But even our technicians do a decent amount of R&D work.

And for what it’s worth, my opinion is that the chemists are much more “inside the box” thinkers. Very smart, but they know one thing - polymer synthesis - well and tend to be pretty slow at figuring out how to actually make the polymers on a large scale, on time, and at a decent cost. God help us all if they have to work with the plant operators or talk to a customer. :stuck_out_tongue:

On the other hand - I’ll be honest, they give me the easy synthesis work. When it comes to making a new polymer, you go to a chemist. When you want to turn that polymer into a finished product, with good understanding of production time, costs, challenges and customer needs - you go to an engineer.

23

I have a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and had to make the same choice as the OP.

I went with ChemE as an undergrad because I liked chemistry, and I thought an engineering degree would give me more flexibility for the future. I found out that that ChemE didn’t actually have a lot to do with pure chemistry. It’s more about unit processes (separations, mixing, chemical kinetics, mass and energy balances, thermodynamics, and mass, momentum, and heat transport). In my junior year, I briefly considered switching to a chemistry degree, but decided it would be almost as much work for a less prestigious and much less flexible degree (particularly as far as the Navy was concerned, as I was on a NROTC scholarship).

Overall, I found my ChemE degree program to be a real ass-kicker. Between reactor kinetics, transport, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, and partial differential equations, it’s not a cakewalk of a major.

In addition, I was actually pretty sick of the material by the time I finished my bachelor’s degree, so it was just as well that I went into the Navy as a nuclear submarine officer. (The degree did help me greatly in the Navy’s Nuclear Power School, however.) In any event, I never actually worked in the field as a practicing chemical engineer.

While in the Navy, the degree also allowed me to teach chemistry at the undergraduate level in a military prep school for several years. At the same time, I developed an interest in environmental engineering, which I got an M.S. degree in.

I’m now a practicing environmental engineer. I’ve taken a rather tortuous career path, but there you go.

24

Chemistry was the pre-eminent degree for versatility in the UK for decades. Very few subjects give you such a broad exposure to analysis and problem-solving across such a variety of systems, from protons and electrons through to large biomolecular assemblies such as protein-protein complexes. This fantastic range of material seems to prepare undergraduates to go on and do whatever they want, really - hard to think of a better degree with which to attack the job market in a ‘generic’ sense, ie you’re not sure what you want to do and want to see what’s out there.
I’ll just throw this out as an observation, as I realise the structure of the US undergrad degree is very different - so the power of the subject at undergrad level may not be the same.

OTOH, if you’re thinking along the lines of becoming a chem engineer or a chemist, it’s worth pointing out that chemistry is one of those degrees where the undergraduate degree is just the very beginning of your training. You’ve not even started. In some other fields, a Masters degree represents the peak of your employability - you can go out and get a decent job with leadership / creative prospects. Going onto a PhD represents a more scholarly direction that is not necessarily been taken with a view to increasing employability.

Chemistry is not like this at all, a PhD is absolutely required for jobs with leadership potential. So you have this extremely tough road in the US of an undergrad degree, followed by PhD (usually 5 years, scandalously expolited to 6+ years in some labs), maybe followed by 2 years of postdoc if the job market is bad (and it’s never been badder at the time of writing). So you could be pushing 30 by the time you’re entering the job market proper. Obviously, the attrition rate for this gruelling process is massive - if you come out the other side you’ll get a well paid and fantastically stimulating job.

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This is extremely important in making your decision. I always shake my head when I hear a student is stopping at the BS degree. And, yes, these days a postdoc is pretty much mandatory, but depending on where you postdoc, it can pay decent (not good) money.

When you go to grad school, you will find that many of the things you learned as an undergrad are basically just teaching you how to think like a chemist. Much of what you learn in undergrad is really old school chemistry, and you have to spend lots of time unlearning what you thought you knew. Chemistry as a field is changing faster than any other subject. I could make a list of the things that changed from the time I entered grad school to the time I left.

On the otherhand, grad school can be a blast. It’s hard work and long hours, but chemists know how to have fun. Also, it’s free.

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From a job hunting perspective, what I’m finding right now is that with the economy slumping so badly, the companies who want chemists just entering the market all want analytical chemists or biochemists and mostly PhDs to boot for any R&D (not QA/QC) job. The places that can really make money right now (the petroleum/petrochemical/energy companies) are the same or really just want CEs at the moment. Of course, depending on how much more schooling you’re looking at, the job market could be much different by the time you’re looking for a job. Honestly, I’m about ready to take on a few more years of grad school and see if the market improves after a third degree.

(By the way, anyone want to hire a synthetic organic chemist with an MS?)

Anyway, job potential is still only part of it. I don’t know much about the CEs, but you’ve got four or five broad categories of chemist: analytical, organic, inorganic, physical, and biochemist. We can argue about that, of course (what about the polymer chemists? the theoretical chemists? the organometallic chemists? and so on) but it’s not a bad approximation. Classes and labs as an undergrad can give you an idea of what you’re interested in, as can undergraduate research and internships. But you don’t really have to choose until grad school.

Now, there was that article in C&EN about four years ago about jobs which including something about the changing perception of the Master’s degree as well as some others but I can’t find the exact one I’m thinking of. Sorry, no direct links as they’re behind the pay wall, but there’s January 2, 2006, pp 35-38 and I’m sure there’s been more since the last employment overview in November 2007 that I’m just not thinking of.

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[QUOTE=WarmNPrickly]
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.
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You didn’t read my first post. I have both. Every one of the chemistry classes I took was the same as the rest of the university, for the record. There wasn’t “chemistry for engineers”, you just took Organic I and Phys I and Inorganic I etc, etc.