What you really need to know and what you’ll use every day: Heat and Material Balances, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Process Control, Separation Processes, and Equipment Sizing. What you won’t probably be taught but you’ll spend a lot of time doing: Instrument sizing and specification (PSVs, Control Valves, Meters); Development of P&IDs (I’m not talking about the Mickey mouse variety); HAZOP and Functional Safety Analysis. It’s a wonderful profession!
The thing that cracks me up about this...I received my B.S. in ChemE in 1997. I've not used a lick of MOST of the topics mentioned since. No chemistry, no heat/mass transfer, no fluid mechanics (which was actually my best course), no process design, none of it. Weird how that turned out for me. Basically my takeaways from my studies were how to approach and solve problems as an engineer, spot trends and analyze data for commonalities, and work with a team. That's mostly what I've done on a daily basis since I graduated. But even with that, I wouldn't trade my time in college for anything else. Sure I don't work in oil and gas and make the big bucks like some of my peers that I graduated at the time, but I'm having fun, regardless.
The tragedy coming from a former chemical engr and now a teacher is that most high school eng. classes focus on mechanical, electrical and civil/architecture but zero chemical.
If the job market supported it then maybe it would be taught more. I'm just curious but if it was so great why did you leave to become a teacher? Or did the first part of my post already cover that?
@codejunki567 it's mostly because lack of access to wet labs. Chemical engineering projects I've done need one like lotion, soap, rocket fuel and pill coating. I always wanted to 'help' and become a teacher. ChemE was the safe career choice.
When I chose chemical related studies, eventually ended up in chemical engineering, I thought that everything was made up of chemicals, I thought it would be so easy for me to find a job in the industry. But in reality they need more mechanical, electrical, aerospace engineers to maintain the existing equipment/ technology. But to become a process/chemical engineer, that design or optimize the process, you need to be really good at everything for the company to take you in as junior/trainee chemical engineering. Now I am just a jobless person with master degree searching for jobs for about a year now.
Is the real true go to any guy thats 10+ years on their job too, they dont realize they mostly end up like mech eng and dont know shitterydodo of chemE anymore is just knowing what machines do not what thevreaction are for, thats why you got lab researcher and "scaling up" is nonsense is mostly just adjusting more of something
Great video Jake. I was taught all the courses you mentioned in the video during my bachelor of engineering degree in chemical engineering at our university in Nigeria. During the statistics course, we were taught descriptive and inferential statistics. We were tempted to relegate statistics to the background because it seemed to be the odd one out but later turned out to be very important to the field of chemical engineering. It was fun studying chemical engineering at the bachelor's and master's levels. I will be going for my PhD in chemical engineering soonest.
Hi Jake, congrats for this video. It is a very good summary for students looking for more information about this field of expertise. Your video edition and script are great also.😄 It will be a source of inspiration to me. Building a career in chemical process engineering and plant design, I would like to add to your audience: once you decide on chemical engineering, you will become an engineer, not a chemist. Moreover, everything that Jake teaches in his book "Becoming an Engineer: The Average Person's Guide to Getting Good Grades and Succeeding in Engineering and STEM School" will be very useful to your professional career also. In addition, there are many career paths for a chemical process engineer, and probably Jack will talk about them on his RU-vid. In any case, if you look for process/plant design, your core activities will be heat and material balance, engineering drawings and specification datasheets. Save my words and will meet each other soon 😇 All the best to you and your audience Jake.
Chemical engineering in my work experience is focused on chemical reactions in detonation waves. Typical product I used to develop was a nuclear warhead, thermobaric detonation weapon and incendiary products. A lot of math to measure physics parameters like pressure, temperature, velocity, acceleration in fluid dynamics. Chemical engineering is very close to biology. In my case, I used to run volume detonation field test to observe typical traumas such explosive could develop on animals. Biology is a key when you as a chemist recommend to use explosion against troops. Poisons development is another aspect of chemical engineering. Biology is a key for that as well. You should be a master at nuclear engineering as well because conventional explosives create a critical mass in all modern bombs. Chemical engineer should be a master of sensor’s field measurements. For instance, in volume detonation you create distribution of fuel aerosols and oxidizer. You need for detailed picture of that distribution to predict of chemical reactions and fluid waves. CS is important for chemical engineers as well. Some experiments like nuclear explosion are very expensive and you should be able to make real life simulations of processes. Partial differential equations and integral equations would be your tools
Hello Jake, thanks for this video. I am a freshman in college and an unsure on what kind of engineering I want to do but I really like Chem and this video helped a lot!!
Thank you sir for the advice ❤ I chose chemical engineering because I love maths, computer science, electronics, design, etc. I want to go to both pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. Become a process or biochemical engineer as well. I also love other engineering discipline like electrical engineering and computer science, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering and civil engineering.
I got my Bachelot's degree in Chemical Engineering in 1981 and worked in oil refineries for 35 years. I chose my electives based on work experience I got working in a paper plant as a COOP student. I chose electives in Computer Science and Mathematical Statistics. My advice on electives is to stick to fundamental topics. This will help you qualify for a P.E. Licence. I chose not to pursue a P.E. License because of the increased liability risk. The P.E. Licence doesn't prove you are a good or bad engineer, because your specific expertise can evolve into areas that P.E. Licensing does not even cover. I would suggest to anyone considering an engineering career to read Ayn Rand's fictional novel, "The Fountain Head", which compares and contrasts inginuity to credentialism, and demonstrates different strategies to control your career path.
Yes. It must be intense if diff eq and linear algebra are in the same course, but then again it can be done for sure. And I have heard Heat and Mass transfer is one of the toughest cohlurses in undergrad chemE along with chem thermo.
He forgot the most scary course chemical engineers have to face, Physical Chemistry. It focuses on the quantum mechanics of atoms and molecules and is crazy mixture of calculus 3, linear algebra, chemistry, and physics. My had classs had a 50% attrition rate.
I am very confused between chemical engineering and mechanical engineering. I love both. I have been comparing, reading, and researching between these two specializations for several months, and I want to know which specialization is more comprehensive. What will develop in the future? I hope you can help me thank you.
If your interest level in both studies are more or less the same, go for mechanical engineering. Fresh graduate here, couldn’t find a chemical engineering related job for almost a year. About half of the people I know did consulting or switched to data engineering…..
My dream is to become a chemical engineer but sadly I feel like somehow my high school hasn’t prepared me to enroll in this degree… I’m amazing at math and love everything that this degree has to offer but my school has been teaching nothing but the basics of trigonometry, geometry and algebra. I believe in myself but I feel like I also have to be pretty realistic, because I’m not dumb, I just don’t know most of the basics because of my classes. I don’t know what to do, now that I’m a senior I feel like I’ve waisted my high school years.
If you are in the US, consider looking into an associate degree in engineering. This is offered at community colleges in larger cities. Afterwards, you can apply to a 4 year college and have the background and first two years done.
Hey, I'm a 17 y.o on my senior year in highschool. I'm planning to take this degree. But the thing is, i'm still really bad calculus, algebra, and trigonometry. Does anyone have any tips?😢
For quite sometime I’ve wanted to be a chemist since I love chemistry and wanted to do research and contribute to society that way. I wanted to go into geo or environmental chemistry and with my research help solve problems. Looking at the pay is really discouraging though. Even PhDs don’t seem to get paid as much as they should. Should I just say screw it and go into Chemical Engineering? I know that it’s not really chemistry focused but it seems to be the closest thing for a much better pay. I don’t really like a lot of math but ig I’ll just learn as I go. Machinery never interested me though so I really don’t know at this point. Maybe I’ll just give up my life dreams and just become a doctor or lawyer lmfao 🤣
Hello. I was just granted a patent on a process for the "green" extraction of flavors, fragrances, nutritional compounds and cosmetic ingredients. I am still on the bench and I want to scale to pilot by designing an upstream and downstream skid. Can you suggest a freelancer, with the software and experience, that I could hire to do the design?
Thank you for sharing this video. I just got offered a scholarship and admission to study chemical engineering at PhD level. I have a Microbiology background with a masters in Environmental Microbiology. I love taking up new challenges. But I want to know if I should go ahead and take this. I am not very strong in maths, physics, and statistics. I'm really scared.
@@shadycactus7896 Thank you so much. Please, I'm open to any suggestions from you on how I can manage the situation and turn it to my advantage. Thank you.
I have been following your videos for less than 2 weeks but the info is very good but I have been selected to do manufacturing engineering, would you consider making a video on what is exactly of us in manufacturing engineering, please
Hey i am an international student going to pursue chemical engineering in united states .. does university ranking and stuff affect our jobs or our chemical engg skills will give jobs😅despite the university?
For fluid mechanics there should be a very high level of overlap, and the same goes for heat transfer. One of my profs used to say that mass transfer is really what separates ChemEs from MechEs. For thermo there may be more of a difference in which parts of the course are emphasized
There is a very large amount of overlap, but ChE's will, of course, be more interested in flows undergoing chemical reactions. At the grad school level, the amount of overlap is even larger. You can find MechE's, chemists, and ChemE's doing almost the exact same things regarding, for example, combustion chemistry.
