Chemical engineering research topics

bluevires

Hey guys, I am from a Canadian university and have just recently took the GRE (1480 for verbal+quant).

I am thinking of applying for graduate studies in the United States, preferably tier 1 schools such as Princeton, MIT etc.. However, after doing some online research it seems that schools like Berkeley and Stanford are mostly focused on biochemical engineering, whereas I am more inclined toward a chemical engineering with some form of possibility for industrial application. Which leads me to the question that I wanted to ask more experienced people in the field, what are some good chemical engineering faculties in the top-tier universities and what discipline/field in chemical engineering would be a good field to look into for graduate studies?

Thanks a lot!

JKQandA

MIT best grad school for that program ... other best ChemEng programs would be University of Texas or California Institute of Technology.

mhmounty

First off, congrats on your scores and your decision to look at graduate education in ChE!

I'd reframe the question that you're asking. What do you ultimately want to do when you graduate? Tier one schools, largely teach you to become a professor. They tend to have more ivory tower, theoretical projects for you to gnaw on. Many of the larger, state schools tend to turn out more pragmatic engineers, who go on to do less academically-based research. There are exceptions to every rule, but if I had to stereotype, that's how I'd do it.

And the second, possibly more important decision that you should consider, is who do you want to work for? This is a harder question to ask before you apply and meet some of these people, but who is doing interesting research at the schools you are looking at? Are they doing something you'd want to do?

I ended up getting accepted to a top 5 school and many other "second tier" schools. I didn't go with the top 5 school, because they only had one professor that had research in line with what I wanted to do. I chose a school that had 3-4 people that I was excited about working for. It's going to be at least 5 years of your life, so you should be excited about the prospects of the research you could do. In my opinion, it's always better to get a first tier professor at a second tier school, than a second tier professor at a first tier school.

As far as the discipline you want to study -- that needs to be solely your decision. Do you like reactions? Separations? Control theory? Find something that you love, then take it from there.

Good luck!