[delta609]

I am a transfer sophomore student interested in chemical engineering.  I'm very excited, and anxious to see what this degree plan could have in store for me.  Is there any advice you all could give me before I start?  It would be much appreciated. 

[Mjones60]

I'll hit you with the bad part of if upfront....Whoever said "college was the best years of their life" didn't major in chemical engineering.  Do a Google search on "most difficult degrees" or "most difficult undergraduate majors" or something to that effect and you'll likely see chemical engineering pop up a lot, alongside physics, other engineering disciplines, etc.  I would plan on devoting a lot of time towards studying, especially if you go to a top engineering school.  I studied around 60 hours a week when I went to Georgia Tech, and still failed the majority of my tests (without the curve).  Good universities tend to make it a point to make the tests impossible, so rather than trying to get a 90 average to make an A, you compete with your classmates and it's understood the bottom 20% of the class will drop or make a D or F.  The rest of the grades are distributed based on a bell curve where a certain percentage of the class, gets an A, B, etc.

Having said that, although chemical engineering is an extremely rigorous undergraduate curriculum, it's also very rewarding.  Check out what typical chemical engineering salaries are at the below link as compared to other occupations.

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000

After you graduate with your degree, your potential employer will know that you are a bright individual just because of the degree you graduated with.  There will be many opportunities because of this, and you will be rewarded for your hard work.  Even if you decide not to get a job in chemical engineering upon graduating, there are still so many opportunities available to you, e.g., medical school, law school, and just other jobs that are completely unrelated because an employer knows if you can graduate with a chemical engineering degree, you have the brains to figure out basically any line of work.

Just as a few final points:

1.  Make sure you like chemistry and math prior to majoring in chemical engineering.  You'll be taking 4 or 5 maths and that many or more chemistry classes.  Then the chemical engineering courses will more or less be a combination of the two.

2.  Make sure you do at least one or more internships.  Not doing any internships was the biggest regret I had.  If you don't do that, your relevant job experience will be blank on your resume' when you're applying for jobs.

3.  Make sure you keep your GPA as high as possible.  After graduating, your GPA is that single number that everyone has that potential employers can weed you out on for it being low or give you extra consideration for it being high.  Many employers will just use a cutoff of 3.0 or something similar to narrow down the applicant pool for entry level hires.  As you progress through your career, the GPA becomes less relevant when applying for other jobs, but that's something always sticks with you.

[curiouscat]

In addition:

Be willing to work with correlations. Lots of correlations. And ugly equations with empirical constants. Lots of graphs and nomograms too.

Accept that a lot of the field is still an art with tons of heuristics. You'll spend much of your time digging up esoteric data whether at a computer terminal or in a traditional library.

Learn to accept and live with fuzzyness. Fuzziness in problem definitions and in the knowledge of phenomenon you deal with.

Be prepared to acquire breadth at the cost of depth sometimes. More than any other Engineer a ChE is sort of a liaison between  other professionals e.g. Chemists, Mechanicals, Electrical Engineers, Structural Engineers, Control Engineers etc. What this means is you'll often get the feeling you are a Jack of All Trades but will have to accept that there's always someone in the room that knows more about an area than you do. 

On a lighter note:

Forget ever getting an analytic closed form solution to your equations.

Resign yourself to working with an unholy jumble of SI, British, American and industry-specific (barrels, degrees Baume, API density, % proof,    ) units.

In a while you'll get into a frame of mind where often a 50% error between design and practice means a surprisingly good day at work.   

Assumptions and approximations left right and center. The data you want is never available.


Be warned that some very smart people absolutely hate the sort of approach a ChE training involves. It isn't everyone's cup of tea; especially not if you like order and hate untied loose ends or jumping between topics without covering each exhaustively.

[curiouscat]

One Caveat:

Chemical Engineering (especially in top notch US schools) is one major where what academic faculty currently research  is often extremely divorced from what you'll work on in a typical industrial assignment.

This is one area you need to be conscious about.