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grover posted:It will always be there on your resume; if you don't put it, people will assume it's even worse than what it actually is, so you HAVE to put it. I don't think this is true. If I saw a resume with more than a few years of work experience on it and the GPA was listed, I would find that strange. As for the thread at large, I'm a chemical engineer, currently in a Ph.D. program. I would never want to work in industry as a Bachelor's level ChE process engineer (and all my former classmates who do seem to hate it), but I find the research side of chemical engineering very interesting.
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Oct 13, 2009 23:15
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Dangbe posted:I guess my questions for you guys are: I know several people who got their Bachelor's in engineering (chemical, that is) in three years. It's definitely doable if you put your nose to the grindstone. I would be very skeptical of anyone's ability to hold down a 30 hr/week job and pursue an engineering degree full-time (or more than full-time in the case of a 3 year degree), in part because of the sheer amount of time needed, but also due to scheduling. I don't know of any engineering programs that offer night-time classes or a substantial amount of summer classes, and certainly not enough to be full-time.
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Oct 19, 2009 20:05
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WyrmHunter posted:All right, well I got tired of not hearing back from any of my job apps and signed up last Friday to take the GRE today. I really do hate to be blunt, but you're not going to get into Berkeley or Stanford with that GPA. That's almost exactly what my GPA was -- 3.35ish overall, 3.55ish ChE. Of the top schools I applied to, I was rejected from almost all of them, despite having a fair amount of research experience and good letters. They just have so many applicants, and a GPA in this range puts you way down the list behind a lot of other spectacular applicants. Now, I did get into a top-tier school for a Ph.D. program and am very happy here, so I'm sure you can do the same, but you do need to recalibrate your expectations a little. If you're still in contact with some of the faculty from your undergraduate program, they can advise you a bit more, or if you want you can PM/email me. You'll also likely find this thread useful: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3194477
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Oct 22, 2009 04:00
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Mongolian Squid posted:What gets me is that the math profs say that most of their courses are service courses for engineers yet most of the methods we learn in the math classes are never used in actual engineering problems. Why the hell are we learning to solve problems one way if we never use it? I have long been a proponent of having an engineering-specific math series, where the focus is on useful techniques rather than proofs.
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Oct 30, 2009 03:04
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Svartvit posted:Always pour the acid into the water, son. Unless you're making Piranha, then you add the hydrogen peroxide to the sulfuric acid. 
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Nov 8, 2009 19:56
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grover posted:The scariest I've worked with is Hydroflouric Acid, which also has a 4 rating. It's colorless and odorless. It can't be stored in glass containers because it will dissolve right through glass It can't even be used in quartz containers- solid teflon is used because it's about the only thing that lasts long enough to be of use. Just passing a silicon wafer over the top of an open container is enough to dissolve glass off the surface. It's as powerful an acid as they come, but if any of it slashes on you, you won't feel a thing because the very first thing it attacks is the calcium in your nerve endings. The first indication of a chemical burn is hours later when it's eaten through your flesh and the excruciating pain starts as it begins dissolving your bones. Yeah, we use this in my lab. When I first started working with it I read the MSDS and it scared the crap out of me. Finding out that a chemical which will be a staple of your research for the next 4 to 5 years can dissolve your bones and stop your heart wasn't something I was too excited about. I guess I've become used to working with it by now, though, and just make sure to have an rear end-load of PPE on and lots of rinse steps. Pfirti86 posted:I had to make that once to clean some glass coverslips, and I hated every second of it. That stuff scares me. Piranha's not so bad (especially compared to HF); just don't seal the waste container or it will explode in a shower of broken glass and acid. Yeah, we've had that happen. Muir fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Nov 9, 2009 |
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Nov 9, 2009 16:49
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Traitorous Leopard posted:What would you say the job of someone with a BS in ChemE entails? I'm considering switching to it, but I'm not too keen (right now) to having to go to grad school to get a decent job. As I don't work in ChE industry I can only give my outsider's impressions, but here we go: It's all mostly process engineer work. Oversee a chemical production process and the techs who run it, make sure your pipes and boilers and reactors are all happy, etc. Maybe be involved in some scale-up or design, but probably not at first. Mostly pipes and steam tables. Someone who actually works in chemical/process engineering please feel free to jump in and tell me how exciting your job is and how much I'm missing out on by avoiding that side of ChemE.
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Nov 11, 2009 05:32
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Namarrgon posted:Does anyone have experience with an advanced degree in Philosophy of Science, Master's or PhD level? I'm not familiar with that field. Someone here might be able to answer you, but you might also find the Grad School Megathread useful: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3194477
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Nov 14, 2009 22:00
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plester1 posted:Pretty darn important, because it leads into differential equations, which is a ChemE's bread and butter. Pretty much this, yeah. I can't think of an area of chemical engineering that doesn't depend on calculus/differential equations.
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Nov 17, 2009 01:51
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Nihilanthic posted:Is it possible to get internships within a Community College? Should I crash a job fair at a University that I would be transferring to, or just eat the two years. Job fairs (at least in engineering) these days seem mostly to be a waste of time.  Everyone, except perhaps small companies, will just tell you to submit your resume on their website. So if you're looking for internships, just compile a big list of likely companies and go to each of their websites. Of course, if you really want to, go ahead and try to crash a career fair. I don't think you're missing much (except perhaps the swag -- I've found some really awesome stuff at some of them).
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Nov 18, 2009 06:26
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Colmface posted:I ended up getting an internship with ABB in Switzerland, which is really exciting. I took a LabVIEW class in the applied physics department here over the summer and I used Hands On Introduction to LabVIEW for Scientist and Engineers. It was a really good book, having you work through exercises as the chapter goes on, and then gives you problems to do at the end of each chapter. A friend of mine likes LabVIEW for Everyone: Graphical Programming Made Easy and Fun but I've never used it.
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Dec 2, 2009 05:02
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Nihilanthic posted:That makes it seem more like a subset of M.E. than applied chemistry, which the name implied. Chemical engineering is first and foremost engineering, not chemistry (it's called chemical engineering because originally it was the study of any and all engineering relating to chemical production processes). As such, there is a lot of overlap between chemical and mechanical engineering: fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics primarily. However, ChE and ME have their own approaches to and spins on these subjects, as well as their own fields that the other doesn't address (reaction engineering and mass transfer for ChE, statics, dynamics, and materials for ME come to mind as examples). So yes, it's not unheard of to have a job like pipe design and engineering that is within the purview of both ChE and ME. But there's a lot of ChE besides that stuff, and we're certainly not a subset of ME. 
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Dec 13, 2009 18:51
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Pfirti86 posted:MechE thermo classes usually don't even go into phase transitions, which is the best part of the class. Still, due to my lack of ME classes like statics and dynamics I don't really feel like a 'real' engineer despite my degrees in ChE. Don't let the MEs define engineering for you. We do our things, they do theirs, and it's all engineering. Leave the feeling insecure about your engineer status to the BMEs. 
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Dec 14, 2009 05:35
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