What Is Chemical Engineering?
Your first
year studying Chemical Engineering at UMass will be greatly focused
on answering one question - What is Chemical Engineering?
Looking up the definition in a book may give
you a short answer, such as in dictionary.com:
Chemical
engineering: n. 1: the branch of engineering that is concerned
with the design and construction and operation of the plants
and machinery used in industrial chemical processes 2: the
activity of applying chemistry to the solution of practical
problems.
However,
Chemical Engineering is much more than simply setting up reactors,
designing processes, or analyzing materials. The purpose of this
website is to help you answer your questions about what Chemical
Engineering is, and to start you thinking about what aspects
of this degree you may want to pursue a career in.
To give
you a better idea of what Chemical Engineering is, let's look
at what some Chemical Engineers do. Chemical Engineers can work
in many different fields. Some Chemical Engineers follow the more
traditional branch of designing and maintaining a process plant.
Others design artificial organs or work with pharmaceuticals.
Still others work to perfect the ink flow in your printer! As
a Chemical Engineer, you can work in practically any field - biology,
chemistry, physics, bioengineering, or medicine, to name a few.
The Careers
section of the website focuses on where these fields interact
-- for example, a chemical engineer interested in medicine could
potentially work on designing better pharmaceutical plants.
The Chemical Engineering field is a relatively new one, only
about a hundred or so years old. It is currently one of the most
dynamic career choices available, with constantly changing technology,
new innovations, and design changes daily being made. As a
Chemical Engineering student at UMass Amherst, you're sitting
in the middle of lots of new movements in the Chemical Engineering
World. You're also sitting in the birthplace of many modern-day
necessities, such as the catalytic converter. The general History
page provides a general overview of where the career came from,
while the History at UMass
site outlines the birth of the present-day program, as well as
many famous people and inventions related to our program here
at UMass Amherst.
[What
is Chemical Engineering?] [Careers in
Chemical Engineering]
[Early Chemical Engineering]
[The History of Chemical Engineering
at UMass]
