Success is like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired-- you quit when the gorilla's tired. - Robert Strauss, (1913-1975) Actor
A Chemical Engineer? That's Just Like a Chemist, Right? Sort of. Chemists utilize their understanding of matter: molecules, atoms, the constituents of everything around us--and create knowledge in the form of new things, new pharmaceuticals, new materials, opening up entirely new areas of discoveries about matter and its uses. In the fewer than 120 or so known elements of the periodic table, as I have always marveled at in a very simplified way -- you take a few of those elements, put them together in a very special way, and you have a plant; put them together in another way and you have instead, a cup of coffee, or a cough medicine, or a human being. Chemical engineers take this knowledge and then transfer the science of the one idea into a science that can affect the multiple potential beneficiaries of that one idea. Consider a medicinal chemist whose team develops the one perfect drug for a given ailment. Having one pill of that drug is beneficial to one patient, but not to others suffering from that same ailment. So chemical engineers, understanding the chemical properties of that one pill and its design specifications, devise the equipment, processes, & methods by which millions of that one pill can be produced so that more than one patient can benefit from the drug. Or in a much more eloquent way of describing what chemical engineering is, straight from MIT, who founded the world's first 4 year chemical engineering curriculum in 1888:
Chemical engineering occupies a unique position at the interface between molecular sciences and engineering. Intimately linked with the fundamental subjects of chemistry, biology, mathematics, and physics — and in close collaboration with fellow engineering disciplines like materials science, computer science, and mechanical, electrical, and civil engineering — chemical engineering offers unparalleled opportunities to do great things.
And the "great things" that result are never due to any one chemical engineer, or any one engineer of any discipline for that matter, but oftentimes the collaboration across all stakeholders, to benefit the public good on an ethical, sustainable, and economic level.Composition in Literature, Composition in Chemical Engineering Despite starting off as an English major interested in the world of literary criticism, I still scraped through somehow in the process of trading my Norton Anthology of Poetry for Stanley Sandler's Chemical and Engineering Thermodynamics...thanks to much patience and tolerance from the chemical engineering faculty that tirelessly supported me. For them, and for my resulting personal and professional opportunities, I am forever grateful. For more of my thoughts on the chemical engineering world, you know it takes energy to get energy. Also please check out the column I write for the NSPE Young Engineer blog.
To converse with the greats by trying on their blindfolds on; to correspond with books by rewriting them; to edit holy edicts, and at the midnight hour to talk with the clock by tapping a wall in the solitary confinement of the universe Vera Pavlova
