The Worth of a Chemical Engineering Degree Discussed

Its been a long two years. I have accumulated debt in the form of student loans, seen my stellar GPA plumit, and witnessed the job market shrink. When I was a freshman, I was told that Chemical Engineering was a straight road to success. Everyone had a job offer, and my future seemed easy. Now I look around and the graduating class, a group of individuals facing low prospects. This group has put themselves through 4-6 years of intense education, refusing to shy away from the most difficult classes. They once dreamed of being employed by a huge oil company, making large paychecks while being enrolled in the best insurance and building a massive retirement. This dream has, for most of them, been crushed. Those who have jobs, approximated to be lower than 50%, aren’t being paid what they expected, and those who are find themselves in high risk sales atmospheres whith limited job security.

I entered Chemical Engineering because I loved the challenge, but in the beggining the challenge was exciting. I have sent my resume to over 20 companies, and one got back to me for an interview. That interview took place over 3 months ago, and I havn’t heard back yet. I feel discouraged, not by my ability– I am a great engineer and could make an incredible contribution if hired. Rather, I feel discouraged by being constantly classified as insufficient. I feel devalued, and thrown aside by the companies who sent reqruiters to my freshman level courses to convince us that they needed more of us. In the beginning, it was inevitable that I win the game. I had control over the game, and it was only a matter of being patient, of waiting until the game was over and my great life began. Now I realize that the game is much more difficult that I thought, and losing is begining to look like the norm.

This expereince has forced me to ask myself whether or not studying the incredibly technical field of chemical engineering was worth it. There is no procrastinating the evaluation of your degree’s value, because the bachelors of chemical engineering is the professional degree in this feild. In this way, it is easy to guage the worth of my studies by the number of job offers I have recieved (0), or the amount of money I will make (currently unkown). But as I continue my struggle towards graduation, and move closer to a possibilty of working in an unrelated feild, I realize that my experience in chemical engineering is much more valuable (currently rated at 0) than its ability to improve my earning potential. I am smarter than I was, I know more than I did, and I understand how the world works more clearly than I could have ever imagined in high school. When I was in high school, I looked great on paper: great GPA, stellar test scores, and more extracurrecular activites than college admissions would believe. But I felt that my application was a bit of a facade, that I had been proped up by teachers, and didn’t actually have the ability to solve, or innovate in the real world. Now I feel empowered, I feel smart and extremely capable. I may not look great on paper, but I know that once an opportunity presents itself (and sometimes I wonder if it will) I will shine.

I can only attribute this intellecutal gain to my studies in chemical engineering. While this is not the only major to accomplish sizeable intellectual improvement in its participants, I can say full heartedly that regardless of the job market, and no matter what the BS or BE in chemical engineering is worth in dollars, it is worth a great deal in personal satisfaction.