Jobs & Careers
Employment opportunities for BA/BS chemists are generally in private industry, government, and education. Fortunately, the applicability of a background in Chemistry is vast, resulting in myriad fields in which one may work. Some examples of these industrial fields and possible jobs are:
- Agricultural Chemistry (testing the toxicity of herbicides at DuPont)
- Biotechnology (working with a team to develop microbial processes to clean up environmental pollution)
- Chemical Information (working as a scientific librarian or market researcher at a large manufacturing company, or for a company that publishes technical literature or journals)
- Environmental Chemistry (designing pollution abatement systems)
- Hazardous Waste Management (field sampling and testing for underground storage tank leakage at a remediation site)
- Material Science (developing new reinforced ceramics for aerospace applications or new Lycra spandex knits for sportswear)
- Medicinal Chemistry (carrying out basic research formulating drugs to treat patients with very rare disorders)
- Oil and Petroleum (working as a chemist at Amoco “fingerprinting” oil leaked in a spill; developing catalysts to improve petroleum fractionation processes).
- Polymer Chemistry (developing polymers such as the one used in transdermal patches like the nicotine patch).
- Sales/Marketing (working as a sales representative for Hewlett-Packard selling chromatographic instrumentation, or carrying out market research for a chemical supply company such as J.T. Baker.
