Chemical engineers’ job duties and requirements

Written by Yiran Li
      Job Duties

Chemical Engineers mainly work in manufacturing, biotechnology or health care. Based on the chemists' discovery, chemical engineers need to use computer model to test the feasibility of the product and to determine its safety to consumer and environment. For instance, chemical engineers work contains optimizing production process, monitoring development and troubleshooting, design the product line with maximum outputs and have equipment based on the environment and economic aspects.

Education Requirements / Professional Requirements

Typically, people need a bachelor's degree in chemistry or chemical engineering to be a chemical engineer. For some jobs, you need to have a Professional Engineering designation through licensure. In the college, chemical engineers' college curriculum will include subjects such as chemical engineering design, linear algebra, biochemical engineering, calculus, chemical reactor design, quantum mechanics and chemical process calculations. Also, you may need strong IT skills, leadership, commercial and business skills and problem-solving ability.

Professional development

The Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) provides many training courses for chemical engineers and some related alternative occupations. Many companies provide internal-training to make sure that graduates can work as professional engineers. Some of those are authorized by IChemE which called Accredited Company Training Schemes (ACTS).

Reference

http://learn.org/articles/Chemical_Engineer_Job_Duties_Occupational_Outlook_and_Education_Requirements.html
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/chemical-engineers.html
http://www.icheme.org/

Prompt Essay 4 : Considering Delivery and Style

Written by Seungyeon Lee

Trade Journal: Women Engineers: Where are the role models?(2007)

Newspaper article: Meet the Next Generation of Women Engineers(2016)

Scholarly article: Women Engineers: Factors and Obstacles Related to the Pursuit of a Degree in Engineering(2008)

Trade journal

Author: Wilson, Richard

Audience: Women in engineers or who are interested who are reluctant to enter to the engineering fields.

Style/Language: Uses professionally looking terms, such as IET, CEO, ISLI.

Publication: Electronics Weekly

Appearance/Others: The letters are small, well organized with the picture. It looks like article in the newspaper. It is written www.youngwomanengineer.org on the bottom of the article.

Newspaper article

Author: Jolin, Lucy

Audience: UK engineers who are concerning why there is lowest percentage of women engineers in UK or someone who is interested in being an engineer in UK.

Style/Language: Uses a lot of direct quotation

Publication: The Guardian

Appearance/Others: The content is mostly all interview based. Allison Dickinson interviewed some women in engineers and put the picture of themselves. It is organized with a bold titles. The writer and the interviewer are different.

Scholarly article

Author: Wentling, Rose Mary and Camacho, Cristina (Volume 14, Issue 1)

Audience: Women in engineering who thinks there still exists a barrier that hinders them to choose their career field to engineering.

Appearance/Others: It has 36 pages about this topic. Is it a research showing the barrier that hinders women from choosing their career field to engineering. 

I would trust more on the scholarly articles because it is based on the research. It may be one sided since they decided the topic and might have drawn the conclusion in advance. However, the fact that there still is a hindrance towards women to choose their career as engineering is shown by their research. Also, whereas trade newspaper and newspaper article were just showing what they hear from others, scholarly article seemed to be more showing evidence and supporting ideas to claim their thesis, which makes it more reliable.

Civil Engineers vs. Architects

            Very recently, I was asked what a civil engineer is and what they do. To the best of my knowledge I explained that civil engineers plan, design and supervise construction of multiple aspects of the world’s infrastructure, such as high ways, buildings, water resources, bridges, railways and so on. 

              The same person, curiously questioned what the difference was between a civil engineer and an architect. To be honest, I didn’t know how to answer that question. I was set on finding out. With a quick surf of the web, I found many others asking the same question. Much of what I found was relieving, considering they are marginally different, but different none the less. While some of the job descriptions overlap, there are differences between the two. 

               Architects mainly focus on the design and functionality of the development work, including the aesthetics of the structure. While engineers focus on the structural elements of the design, ensuring the building, bridge, or any type of structure can endure extreme and normal conditions. 

                Long story short, civil engineers have a broader field because they work on a multitude of different buildings with architects but they also branch out to bridges, railways and water systems, which architects are not involved. There is no question they are similar, but to summarize, civil engineers handle the structural aspects while the architect’s main objective is to focus on the design and aesthetic of the design and development work.

Prompt 9: Importance of Engineering

Written by: Callaghan TysonMayer

An article I found highlights the importance of engineers in medicine. This article, "Speeding Up Medical Research" by Nancy Giges, demonstrates how critical engineering technologies are for medical patients.
Dr. Melissa Knothe Tate invented a technology for imaging that focuses on human tissues, "in layman's terms, the Zeiss technology can do for the human body what Google Maps do in zooming from an earth view to a street view" (Giges). If you've never used Google Maps, just imagine looking at a picture of a globe and then looking at a picture of your backyard. This is a huge difference!
This advancement makes an incredible difference in the medical world, and it is only because of engineers like Knothe Tate that this growth in technology is possible. Without biomedical engineering, medicine would be nothing like how it is today.

Link: Giges, Nancy. "Speeding Up Medical Research." The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. N.p., Oct. 2015. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

Source: Giges, Nancy. "Speeding Up Medical Research." The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. N.p., Oct. 2015. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.