• Question: morning! were in s4/year11. i was wondering weather you could tell me when you were at university did the courses prepeare you for this job or what?

    Asked by abu to Anne, Arthur, Rose, Ruhina, Thomas on 22 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Arthur Wilkinson

      Arthur Wilkinson answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      My courses did help prepare for my job as after my GCSEs all of my courses were in polymers! So I’ve not got a typical education.

    • Photo: Rose Simnett

      Rose Simnett answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      I do think that the courses prepared you for work in a chemistry lab. I think the importance of the practical aspect was not stressed enough and we did not do very much polymer chemistry, so I’ve had to learn a bit when I started. The whole degree does teach you how to learn things yourself and how to solve problems.

    • Photo: Ruhina Miller

      Ruhina Miller answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      The course I did at Imperial College covered a very wide range of chemistry areas; at the time I found this to be quite broad but later I realised that this was actually useful – it lets me explore all aspects of the subject to find what area/s interested me more than others, but more importantly the knowledge or skills learnt from one area are very often useful in another! We didn’t do any surfactant work as an undergraduate but the concepts learnt from other areas was a good enough start. Also, we did a lot of laboratory work which was very useful!

    • Photo: Thomas Farrugia

      Thomas Farrugia answered on 22 Jun 2015:

      Hi Abu – I think chemistry courses can prepare you for a lot of things – there’s a popular quote from the Royal Society of Chemistry saying “Not all chemists wear white coats”, which means that there’s a whole range of things you can do after you finish the course – quite a few people go into things like finance, teaching, science communication, working in industry or doing actual research.

      Some courses can be a bit more specific towards particular jobs, but an undergraduate degree in chemistry should kit you out with a solid enough knowledgebase and broad skillset that you can use to tackle all sorts of problems, especially those which you’ve never done before!

      Like Rose I think the most important thing I learnt at University was the actual process of learning – how to tackle new material and make sense of it and use it to solve problems.

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