Every day we use many
different chemical products. We take for granted the many
chemical things around us. Those people who have not lived
through a war or visited a deprived country find it difficult
to imagine life without the products of chemistry. The women
and men responsible for chemical advances are chemists,
chemical technologists and technicians, and chemical
engineers.
Chemists can be found
working in many places, such as universities, hospitals,
industrial research labs and government labs. Chemists invent
new substances, determine the composition of matter, invent
new techniques to study the behaviour of matter, investigate
how reactions occur, develop theories and models to help
understand and extend our knowledge of matter, study the
energy in reactions and the speed at which they occur. The
chemist is a problem solver. Unlike many university degrees,
which require separate qualifications for different countries
and even different provinces within Canada, a university
degree in chemistry qualifies the holder to be a chemist
anywhere in the world!
Chemical technologists and
technicians can be found almost anywhere that science is
applied. Technologists and technicians are skilled at
operating scientific equipment and handling chemicals. They
often work in a team with a chemist or engineer: they
contribute to important discoveries; they record and evaluate
data; they can service equipment. They are essential to the
entire network and are the "testing" and
"measuring" specialists.
Chemical engineers work in
many different areas of science, especially, but not
exclusively, industry. Chemical engineers invent and develop
industrial processes to make many different consumer goods;
they are responsible for the scaling-up process that turns a
lab-scale experiment into an industrial-size operation; they
use electronics and computers to analyze data. A chemical
engineer is responsible for the successful design of a
chemical plant, for the safety of those who build it and for
the protection of the natural community around it. The
chemical engineer is a problem solver and is probably the
most versatile of all engineers.
However, these are not the
only careers that involve chemistry. There are many others
such as teaching, dentistry, medicine, pharmacy, patent law,
technical writing, veterinary medicine, and even business
administration. "Chemistry is the central science."
