Hello, everyone. I hope you are well and had a great Christmas holiday.

I have just finished the final exams and ready to start the new semester. For today, I would like to talk you through Chemical Engineering (ChemEng), here in the UK and what actually you would be studying if you pick to study Chemical and Process Engineering. A lot of people mistaking ChemEng with Chemistry. It’s a common confusion that people think Chemical engineers go to the lab and mix samples of chemicals to invent new material. This is absolutely not what you would be doing in the course. Ok, so the question is what we actually study. As a ChemEng student, you would be studying a lot of heat and material balances, fluid mechanics, Thermodynamics, learning how to design cooling towers and distillation columns used in refineries all around the world, learning about heat exchanges and so on. Along with these main modules, you would also be learning how to work with programming packages such as Matlab as well as learning to work with simulation packages like Aspen Hysys and ChemCad which are essential for the final year when we are working on the design project. Most of this stuff are used in the actual world of design mostly in oil and gas sector. But that’s not all, as part of this degree at the University of Surrey you would be learning about the business part of the design such as calculating capital and operation costs and how to minimise the cost in order to maximize the profit of a plant or a specific equipment. You will also be learning about soft skills such as teamwork and time management since there are a lot of group projects and coursework that has to be done within the time frame.

The course itself is very academically demanding meaning that it requires a lot of self-study hours, however, the best results are achieved when working together to solve the problems. Most of the course requires lengthy calculations which need in-depth understanding of the subject, so my advice to you is, revise after each lecture and do every single question that is provided to you with the help of your friends. That’s when you actually learn.

So why studying Chemical Engineering? Chemical Engineers are highly employable across all industries such as Oil and Gas, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Consumer Good Products, Energy and so on. Every industry that manufactures something there is a need for Chemical Engineers. So the future looks bright, but it requires hard work and passion.

Ok, everybody that was a very brief introduction to Chemical and Process Engineering and I hope it was useful to anyone thinking to go down that route.