The Chemportal

The vocational Bachelors degree in Chemistry should be devised for people who wish to obtain their degree and be employed in the industry right away, rather than go on to graduate school.  It is designed to increase sense of trust between the employer and the new graduate’s ability to perform functions that are deemed to be fundamental to the industry.

1)  Standard coursework in theory equivalent to the Bachelors degree in Chemistry

2)  Certification on HPLC maintenance and organic synthesis consisting of very basic training for entry level positions in the industry.  These two skillsets are cited as examples.  

The benefits

-Less concern about lab messups or instrument damage on behalf of the employer.

-Better job placement for new graduates rather than having jobs taken by people from oversees.

-More people enrolling in the Chemistry program and an increase in diversity.

Please refer to the previous post to understand where all of this stemmed from.

As for the final note on this thread I would like to make a few pointers as well as acknoweldgements based on the comments that have transpired.

I should have known before endeavoring in the Chemistry major that becoming a chemist would involve getting at least a Masters degree even if it seems that even this degree simply leads to , by eventual requirement , obtaining a phD . 

A lot of people that I knew who had just obtained their Masters were very unhappy with the experience and believed that their degree would not help them in the industry.  I once new a girl from UC Davis who had obtained her Masters and had commented to me that she didn’t know where the degree would take her.  Kyle at Thechemblog had recently remarked on the rather modest reality of his prospects in the industry now that he is about to graduate.

My two supervisors at my past two jobs in the industry had no respect for chemical theory.  They were very good scientists nevertheless, they were quick at picking up on the literature and were able to devise  of ingenious experiments accordingly.  They had the brains of medical doctors in this sense, they could care less about the theory, however they could pick apart information from good memory.  My previous supervisor who has a phD got furious when I wanted to discuss some theory with him to explain why we were finding a higher pH of a solution after an organic reaction when a acidic pH was expected.  It turns out that he had forgotten his theory, as he scribbled a short explanation on the marker board - all the while foaming at the mouth - he blurted ” … I don’t care if it’s SN1 or SN2 … ” when clearly the reaction was an Nucleophilic Addition Elimination reaction. So where are the people who appreciate the theory?   My first supervisor  seemed to believe that discussing theory was not worth the time, he had a Masters from U of Texas at Austin.  Both supervisors were earning the big bucks as both companies were prominent in the medical sector.  My impression from this experience was that theory is dispensible.  If you can succeed in the industry without chemical theory then fuck theory.

I understand all of your statements that there is no way to become a chemist, a physicist, or a medical doctor without extensive schooling since all of these fields require a wide range of expertise.  In this sense I guess a Bachelors in Chemistry doesn’t really mean anything to the industry.  I wonder why there are so many jobs out there that simply require just this degree e.g. Analytical Chemist with at least 2 years of HPLC experience.  Who on earth gets these positions?

 I obtained my degree with a great gpa, and now the only place to go is academia for another degree, a Masters.  I’m not able to get entry level positions at this time in either the analytical or organic sector, although I am currently in process chemistry.  I wonder if I’m going to be cheated again with a Masters degree.  I make this remark because I get the sense that these days that Chemistry is becoming more and more ancient as a science and that the relationship between Chemistry academia and the industry is especially a fuzzy one.  And as I have mentioned before a Masters is not deemed to be advantageous in some states.  Maybe it’ll have to be a phD.

For those of you who wish to hear about my revised proposition for a vocational Bachelors degree please refer to my previous post.  http://www.chemicalforums.com/index.php?topic=28079.msg106670#new

At my previous job as an entry level process chemist there were times where people who were “high” on the corporate ladder would visit the pilot lab to assess its development and make certain that the site was properly situated for what would be future visitations from the FDA.  There were several sectors of one which was the mixer room the others were essentially related to engineering processes.  These people from corporate would not enter the mixer room while they would be very critical of these other sectors ; evidently none of them wanted to enter a room which stocked various toxic chemicals. 

We chemists are exposed to different chemicals each day and are going to be for the time being that one is a chemist.  Does this have any influence on our mortality as compared to people of the general population?

Some links related to this matter

Chemists may have higher suicide rates than dentists

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010420.html

Women in chemistry have higher suicide rates

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5DD1031F937A3575BC0A961948260

Possible problems with the research applied contemporarily

http://yarchive.net/chem/chemist_death_rate.html

This guy at my workplace is going to grad school in New York while working here in Georgia , the company pays for his tuition and he gets video lecture material all through the net , his major is in chemical engineering , and it seems that this mode of education is becoming a lot more common these days.  He takes his tests through a local center and is proctored by someone who is certified for the matter.  His degree is going to be standard, there’s not going to be any indication of whether he had actually attended the university itself from which he is getting his degree.

But what a life, he goes to work during the day and studies at night.  One is earning money and on a way to getting a degree at the same time ; there’s always the good aspect of furthering one’s learning as well as the increasing the prospect of a higher income in the future.

Part of an extraction procedure that’s employed requires phosphate buffer as the solvent for one of the steps (extraction procedure is confidential).  Now, I never had problems with it before , and had been making it for several months until one day some clear crystals became prominent within the solution ; as in whole chunks of it.  The crystals resemble ice and appear about a day after the phosphate buffer is prepared in a large scale V shaped container.  Again, this had not occured during the first several months (~5 months).

The crystal may be a hydrate of the tribasic component, anhydrous phosphate is the white brittle substance that appears once it’s solid form is placed in water, however the hydrate’s solubility may be drastically altered with temperature as it is with sulfate.

Thus it may be the case that even a 1 to 2 degrees change in temperature over time would have precipitated out the hydrates.

A few days ago, I took the trip back to the University to have that special talk with the professor once more, so that I could finally obtain the grade for the last of the courses that I took for an ACS certified Bachelors Degree in Chemistry.  Well, after a few more revisions, and hours of sitting in his office while he edited the report, the report was edited to his content and a few days later I revised it and gave it back to him.  Eventually, I got a letter of apology from him with details that I prefer not to mention here and two ‘As’ towards my G.P.A.

For those of you that don’t know what I’m referring to, the issue entailed a period during which my professor would not grade my paper so as to give me a grade for the course, which was an independent study session.  The course took place during the fall semester of 2006, and he had edited the paper during the last few official days of the spring semester of 2007.

Now, I can go on to receive a real chemist’s wage. 

I went downtown to investigate how things were at the University.  People, mostly students, were socializing at the restaurant patios in a European type of atmosphere.  I got a glimpse of a couple of nervous students walking around previewing the University, and am reminded of my freshman year during which a lot of things were uncertain. 

Is it because some of them don’t smile?  A lot of coffee?  Probably the combination of both …. without brushing their teeth.  Yes , a lot of science professors, especially the old fashioned ones (some of them are very accomplished by the way) have green, rotting, teeth. 

During the period that one of my last courses, biochemistry, was in session, I remember an occasion where I had stopped by the professor’s office to point out an error in the grading of a test.  He was friendly, in a very excitable mood, and had raised my grade by an extra 10 percent in addition to the percentage that would have been added even if the grade change was incorporated.  He then proceeded to ask me about how the course was and then promptly moved on to the next subject which seemed to preoccupy him with great excitement….the future of biochem. 

He asked me what I envisioned to be be the future area which biochemistry would be sure to encompass; the current accomplishments of biochemistry consists of all aspects of human physiology, in essence, he had explained that biochemistry had already mastered this area for several decades now and that future textbooks are going to cover all areas of…….the human psychology.  And it’s going to be comprehensive and masterful in its exactness just as good as how contemporary biochemistry texts interpret human physiology.

Maybe he isn’t the only biochemist who is so excited about this topic.  Francis Crick had endeavored in this field until his death.

He claimed that wars would always occur, unless the biochemistry of the human psychology would be elucidated fully.

I remember reading Kary Mullis’ autobiography and a chapter from this book describing the event of getting a physics article published in Nature , despite the fact that he was a chemist.  Kary Mullis was the chemist who came up with the PCR technique.  The article that was published consisted of his musings on time travel from what I remember…….he apparently wrote it while in a drug induced state.  According to his autobiography, Nature was quite embarrassed in publishing the article and for indicating the author as a physics professor.

So do Chemist’s prefer Nature or Science?  They both seem to be more biology oriented, not much pure Chemistry going on besides what may be more closely ascribed to as molecular biology.  Both of them cost a fortune, I just paid over ten dollars for latest copy of Nature.