Working as a chemist is a great career. Sometimes doing the same laboratory practices can become tedious. The good thing is that the results are never the same.
Tips for someone is to work in a laboratory as an undergraduate. This will help with gaining experience for whatever one decides to do after the undergraduate degree. Make sure to work on your own project while an undergraduate. This can be of great help if deciding to further one's career.
I would tell anyone who loves science to become a chemist. Chemistry encompasses everything in the world. With chemistry, there's always something new and rewarding to study and learn.
While at times chemistry can be boring and at times difficult, the work varies a lot from day to day. Many projects are very rewrding and coworkers are often extremely interesting people.
I love being a chemist and would recommend this career. It is a fun job that is also challenging from an intellectual stand point. A tip to a new comer is to be inquisitive and fall back on your intuition to solve problems. A few pros to the career are that you get to use your brain, and are (usually) judged based on intelligence and efficiency rather than the number of hours you work. One con is that some problems can be so hard that they are virtually unsolvable. This career can be dangerous, but that depends on which aspect of chemistry one goes into; however if you are careful, you can work an entire career incident free.
I have a Ph. D. in chemistry, and this is a path that I would recommend only to those that are truly in love with the field they chose to study in graduate school. It is hard to change from that area once you leave graduate school. If you want to do something else later, it is difficult to convince others that you have skills in areas similar to what you worked on. The work is interesting, and not repetative at this level. I work on many types of sample analysis, and it is very different every day. You must have an ability to analyze many types of data, and to be able to look analytically at the data coming off an instrument to know if it is worth continuing. I would recommend this to people who like attention to detail and figuring out problems. I would do this again; I love the work. It can be a lot of fun.
I worked in a pharmaceutical company scaling up a process to mass produce a drug. I did not enjoy doing the office work, but i do enjoy actually making the drug. Office politics can play a big role in your job and what you do. I do not think I would work there again. I was miserable working there, and am very happy that I am not there anymore.
I would definitely recommend Chemistry as a field. There is chemistry in everything we do. I think I would have chosen the same field. Pros are helping people developing new drugs. Cons are mediocre salary. Sometimes there are surprises with what we find.
Dentists have one of the highest suicide rates of all professions. Their rate of suicide is 6.64 times greater than the rest of the working population.
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