Gareth C.

What were the best things about your course?

It's cliché of me to say it but one of the best things about Chem-Eng at Surrey was the people. I have met some of my best friends on that course and have rubbed shoulders with some of the most freakishly talented people I've ever met. I will never forget my years at Surrey.

But on top of that, the breadth of content covered has been a real win. I've managed to go out into industry very confident that I can tackle most problems and that nothing will be a surprise. When you add to that, that the content is being taught by some of the most passionate engineers I've ever met, it's hard not to become a die-hard Chem-Eng fan. The faculty not only have a genuine interest in their content, but they also truly care about your understanding, beyond just passing exams. Most of them bring real industry experience to the table, helping you see things in a more practical light. This ensures you don't enter the industry as a naïve engineer who has only dealt with theory or idealized scenarios.

I'm not sure if it's still going, but the POMS week was a HUGE benefit to my education. Not only did it give me some hands-on experience about what running a plant is really like and all the things to think about and challenges associated with it, it also helped me determine what role(s) I would and wouldn't want to apply for in industry. And it never hurts to have that kind of experience on a CV!

What do you do now? How did your degree from Surrey help you achieve this?

I am now a Senior Engineer working in Research and Development for Mondelez International (Cadbury), primarily in the chocolate category.

Over my career so far, I've done a wide variety of different things, from reformulation of products, to optimising manufacturing processes, to designing and building new process technologies, and even to understanding the governing principles and mechanisms in between our product portfolio. If someone had told me I'd one day be doing non-Newtonian fluid pressure-drop calculations on chocolate, I'd have told you, you were mad. Now it's my day-today! 

Which is precisely how my degree has helped me. It has given me this massive toolbox of things I can use to make sense of the world I work in and then innovate and create new things. 

It's given me a good appreciation for a wide number of topics that mean I'm not surprised when they pop up in real life. I now work at the cutting edge of technology in my industry and it's only possible because of the things I learnt and were exposed to in my degree.

What’s your advice to current students?

Don't let how niche or specific some of the examples in your degree may be, put you off joining other industries. As chemical engineers a lot of our course material is (understandably) geared towards Oil and Gas, heavy chemical or pharmaceutical industry, but that doesn't mean you can only work in those sectors. 

The important thing is to understand what principles and techniques you've been taught and therefore how you can apply them in other ways. 

Sure, I haven't designed a fractional distillation column since graduating; but I still regularly do scale-up calculations; heat, energy and mass balances; and apply the key principles like fluid-flow and thermodynamics. So, I'm still doing chemical engineering, just in a different way. Did you know chocolate crystallises in order to become a solid, and that it is polymorphic and has crystals that form in 6 different ways? No? Me either! We never covered it at uni. But what we did cover was crystallisation, nucleation, thermodynamics and all that other fun stuff. So, when I then joined the industry and was faced with "Tempering" chocolate, I already had a good handle on what was important to change and consider. Similarly, my lectures on Brownian Motion and the Krieger-Dougherty equation never included a chocolate example; but I now deal with suspension rheology on a daily basis.

Chemical Engineering is one of the most powerful degrees you can take, because of how widely it can be applied. I'm certain that whatever industry you join you will be able to apply your Chem-Eng skills, you just might have to think of applying them in a different way. And just because you might not be designing columns every day, doesn't mean you're not an engineer.

Also, as a little side-note to those on placement... it's just as important to work out what you don't want to do with your career, as it is to work out what you do. So no matter how it's going/gone, no placement year is a waste of time.

Find out more about Chemical Engineering at Surrey.