Are most of the chemical engineers working in the lab?
It depends on what you want to do. I am a chemical engineer, and I work entirely in a R&D lab at a university. Many of my colleagues work in chemical plants, though. The plant jobs consist mainly of monitoring plant equipment, supervising the operators, troubleshooting problem processes, etc. I would have to disagree with the previous poster. ChemE is certainly not the hardest engineering discipline you can do. The experience will depend on your school, though. For me, I only had one chemistry course more than the other engineering streams, and then had 1 lab course in each of my 3rd and 4th years. Not really much time in the lab at all. Basically the difference between a chemist and a ChemE is scale. Chemists do things on a small scale, and generally work with development of new chemicals and processes. ChemE’s work on very large scales – learning how to take what the chemists come up with and make it work in the industrial world. A ChemE is part chemist, part physicist, part economis
