Greetings fellow engineers and engineers to be!
I am Zlata, and I will be your part 2 Chemical and Materials blogger for 2024. Before I rattle on about my experience and why you should choose this spec, I feel like I should first tell you why I chose it!
My Journey with CHEMMAT!
I am one of the few students who went into the engineering degree knowing that I wanted to specialise in CHEMMAT. To me none of the other specialisations stood out, they were fun but not really my thing. So when I finally got to do the associated paper in semester two of my first year, it’s safe to say I fell in love! Naively, I expected my whole specialisation to be just like that paper, and I was shocked to find out that was not the case! Don’t worry, I won’t leave you in the dark. I will make sure that by the end of your time with me you will know the ins and outs of what the spec is so you don’t have to be a shocked second year like I was.
What is Chemical and Materials Engineering?
I feel like the question on everyone’s mind, and a question that has plagued me for the longest time is, what is Chemical and Materials Engineering? If I were to sum it up concisely, it’s like playing Factorio in real life! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, good on you for being a functional member of society! To explain properly, Chemical and Materials Engineering is a specialisation focused on mainly two aspects: Materials and their properties, and Process Engineering. In your first year, you will undertake a materials paper and, unfortunately, you won’t get to experience the joys of the processing part until you dive right into your second year. If you remember block flow diagrams from ENGGEN 140, it’s a lot of that! ‘What is CHEMMAT’ will be a recurring question in my blogs, so while I leave you with only this overview now, I hope to add to it bit by bit as we go through our time together!
Should you choose Chemical and Materials Engineering?
I am, as you may expect, incredibly biased, so yes you should! BUT, I do know that not everyone likes chemistry. Whether you are feeling like you should join or briefly glancing at my blog to get a general idea of what you want to do, I invite you to come along for the ride. Who knows? You might find yourself liking what you hear :).
But I will clear up a few things that might be on your mind:
- Yes, there is a lot of math!
In any engineering specialisation, you would find yourself making friends (or enemies?) with our very old-time friend math. This came as a huge surprise to me when I began this year.
- Yes, we have to code!
If you are like me and would rather tear your own eyes out than write code, there is some relief: it’s only one paper! I enjoy CHEMMAT coding a lot more than in semester 2 of my first year just because it feels a lot more interesting and applicable. - There aren’t as many materials papers as there are processing papers.
Although our title is Chemical and Materials Engineering, most of our degree focuses on processing with materials knowledge as a helping guide and tool. But you shouldn’t be discouraged, there are still plenty of fun materials and papers to come in the general course and electives! - It isn’t a glorified Chemistry course.
The specialisation leans toward science, utilising many chemistry and physics principles. But first and foremost, we are engineers. We often use the knowledge of the sciences to supplement real-world applications and learning. We don’t learn only for the sake of learning, but we also get closely acquainted with the industry and where we will be using these skills.
With all that said and done, I hope you guys are excited to follow me on this journey through my first year of this specialisation, and I am confident that I may make you consider joining CHEMMAT for at least 0.5 seconds!
Good luck with your studies!
Zlata
Thank you Zlata, this was a great read. 👍