what's up guys welcome back to my channel it's your boy Al in the building
and i'm back with another video in today's video i'm going to be
telling you guys five things i wish i knew before studying
chemical engineering i was recently on reddit and i
was kind of curious you know so i made a post and i asked
people in the chemical engineering subreddit
what is one thing you wish you knew before studying chemical engineering
i think i got like a hundred different responses and it was just so interesting
to see the experiences of other people what
they wish they knew you know i feel like it's good to learn from other people's
experiences so if you're thinking of studying chemical engineering make sure
you consider some of these things i'm about to say
and if you're currently studying chemical engineering please drop a
comment down below what is one thing you wish you need
before studying chemical engineering without further ado let's get into the
video so the first thing i wish i knew before
studying chemical engineering is how little chemistry there is compared
to the rest of the curriculum. chemical engineering is 99 engineering
1% chemistry the fact that i was good in chemistry in high school and i really
enjoyed it it had such a big impact on my decision to pursue
and to study chemical engineering in college i mean
chemistry in high school was so cool though we did so many cool
labs and experiments we made s'mores we made sparklers we made
our own soap and i just thought wow i love chemistry chemistry is fun but
looking back this was a mistake because in college i
found that i don't even like chemistry as much as i
thought i did it just wasn't fun we weren't making
s'mores in lab. if you like chemistry in high school you
might not like it as much in college so take that into
consideration but yeah that's number one thing the next thing i wish i knew
before studying chemical engineering is that
most chemical engineers work in plants and refineries
i don't know why i didn't even factor this in
i think i thought that they worked in labs and they just generally
blew up stuff and just did cool experiments but
clearly i was wrong personally i would rather work in an
office setting than work in a plant and most of the people that i've talked to
that work in plants they generally they don't last too long because
most of the time if you work in a plant you're going to be on call so that means
if something goes wrong in the plant they're going to call you to fix the
problem so not a good work-life balance and another thing that it threw me off
is the fact that a majority of plants and refineries are in the middle of
nowhere so imagine you get done with a long week of work
after being on call and you have nothing to look forward to
because you live in the middle of nowhere
there's nothing to do on the weekends there's nothing to do outside of work so
yeah i would rather work in an office
environment or better yet i would rather work remote and i
mean we've seen through this coronavirus pandemic that
that's probably the future. most jobs are going to be automated and
a lot of jobs are going to be remote for the foreseeable futures
do you see yourself working in the plant or refinery in the middle of nowhere?
if not maybe you should reconsider chemical engineering. another thing i
wish i knew before studying chemical engineering is that
chemical engineers have a smaller job market compared
to some of the other engineering disciplines for example,
software engineering, electrical engineering so it can be harder to find
job opportunities. the good thing though is that if you do study chemical
engineering that doesn't mean that you have to do
chemical engineering when you graduate because i've read and i know people that
went on to do stuff like business, finance, law, etc but as you can
see the world is becoming more digitized as time goes on and
everything is getting automated so disciplines like that are really
able to capitalize off the trends in technology
so knowing what i know now i would have chosen
something like software engineering or even data science because
jobs like data science and software engineering are just
the future the good thing is though that at least you can learn
how to do coding and data science just in case you would like to break into
that when you graduate and to even further expand your
marketability for getting jobs because a chemical engineer that knows how to code
and do all that data science stuff is dangerous
you're getting any jobs. and the final thing i wish i would have known before
studying chemical engineering i wish i knew what chemical engineering
was. mind-blowing right no i really wish i would have known what
chemical engineering was it's hard to answer the question what
does a chemical engineer do because in different industries they have
different roles for example a chemical engineer that works in the semiconductor
industry with a company like intel will do something totally
different than a chemical engineer that works with
batteries and for companies like tesla for anyone studying chemical engineering
right now or even thinking about it the most important thing to do
i know it's sometimes hard though like i'm even struggling with finding
internships but doing some internships before you
graduate is a must so you can see the things that you might
be interested further down the road and the things that you're absolutely not
interested in but overall if i would have known some of these things
before studying chemical engineering there's a good chance i probably
wouldn't be studying chemical engineering right now i don't know
but thank you guys so much for watching this video i hope you guys enjoyed the
video and if you're watching this video and you're currently a chemical
engineering student let me know down below what's one thing you wish you knew
before studying chemical engineering if this video added value to you please
click the subscribe button down below and i'll see you in the next video!