On studying chemical engineering

One of the recent mysteries that I have stumbled across is trying to remember why I chose to study Chemical Engineering - I think it had to do with that it was one of those engineering disciplines that didn't have statics as a core requirement (mind you I am quite bad at Statics!). Otherwise, I don't really remember, and to be honest, I think its a good thing - choosing the discipline when I applied to college, led me to find my prof Dr. Saad Bhamla, and through the research got me to Stanford. I think the appropriate adage is "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

But if I had to really reflect on what I think about chemical engineering, I would say its a very different discipline than what I initially thought it would be. When I started, I was excited to be running cool chemistry experiments in big reactors; I was very sad when I found out that chemical engineering is ironically not about chemistry. It's really all about transport - from heat, momentum, and mass transfer with a splash of chemistry. How do you move and transform compounds from one unit to another in the most optimal way?

Even though I was sad about not having much chemistry in my engineering classes (I just added Chemistry as another major to make up for it), I still enjoyed chemical engineering. Something about linking vastly different units to another from reactors, mixers, separations columns, heaters to transform a raw feedstock to a finished product was quite magical for me. My favourite class was Senior Capstone Design, where I had the opportunity to completely create, model, and optimise a novel pathway to produce biofuel from biomass feedstock.

In my opinion, the best chemical engineers, and by extension engineers in general, aren't necessarily the ones that can solve all the problems, but rather those who can identify the most important problems to solve. I believe that this is the most important meta-skill I picked up from Chemical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Our professors always wrote the toughest tests, and would never give us enough time to solve the problems. They stressed the importance of figuring out the process to solve the problem than they ever did in finding the correct answer. I remember one of my professors, Dr. Breedveld, stating "I am here to teach you how to say I don't know. However, I am also here to teach you to say I can still try to solve for a process."

Another key skill that I picked up from Chemical engineering was understanding how to visualize or breakdown a process; I think that is why my cooking became better as more chemical engineering courses I took! Understanding how to place different equipment at different stages along a process, translated over to me understanding how various techniques in cooking help create the final dish.

Finally, the most important skill I picked up as a Chemical Engineering student, was the ability to be adaptable. In our chemical safety class, the entirety of the class was just doing case studies of plant disasters (Bhopal, Seveso, Texas BP, etc). We quickly learned that even the best planned operation can go wrong, and as chemical engineers, we have to adapt to the situation and search for solutions in short time frames, because death is a high possibility.

Overall, I am glad to have studied chemical engineering, because it has led me to now enjoy my core classes in Bioengineering. My professor has stressed that his class is more of a process building class; every week we learn new tools to model a phenomenon, and in the end, we will have a project where we design our own model of a complex biological phenomenon. Thanks to ChemE, I am not scared of tackling the project, and in a larger sense, not scared of studying a new field!