Chemical engineering programs teach people to use chemistry to design products and systems. Students learn about chemical changes, kinetic systems, and heat and mass transfer. They also learn to solve problems about issues such as corrosion, energy loss, and pollution.

If you have taken a chemistry class, you've seen reactions occur in a test tube. Now imagine what it's like to scale up a reaction to the size of an industrial batch. Instead of producing a few tablespoons of output, you must produce tons of output. And you must do so by the cheapest, fastest, cleanest, safest method possible that will guarantee good results. This is the kind of challenge you study in chemical engineering.

You may study a problem such as this one encountered by a food franchise company: Every so often, a five-gallon bag of ketchup explodes. You need to find out why. Is it the recipe for the ketchup? The packaging? The way the packages are stored? Once you find the reason, you also need to devise an economical way to solve the problem.

In this major you apply principles of chemistry and other sciences. You learn the latest scientific discoveries, and you find creative ways to use them. You learn how to run tests in a chemistry lab or measure data during an industrial process. As a project, you may simulate a chemical process using a computer. You learn to work with products such as pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilizers, or synthetic fibers.

With four, possibly five years of college you can enter this field. The common requirement is a bachelor's degree. A large number of engineering schools in the U.S. offer this major. Some allow you to combine a bachelor's and master's degree in a five-year program.

Another possible route to entering this field is to get a bachelor's degree in chemistry, then get a master's in chemical engineering. About 140 graduate schools in the U.S. offer a master's program.