r/ChemicalEngineering • u/fatimalizade • Jul 05 '25

Software Software recommendations

Hi everyone, I’m currently doing my master’s degree in Chemical and Energy Engineering, but my bachelor was in Chemistry, so I didn’t pick up any programming skills in my previous studies, but actually I’ve done some MATLAB courses and learned basics.

Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my group mates and she mentioned that you can’t get a research or software-based job with MATLAB, it’s useless and you have to learn Python instead.

So I’m wondering is it still worth spending time on MATLAB?

8 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/APC_ChemE Advanced Process Control / 10 years of experience Jul 05 '25

Matlab's great to learn to write programs and algortithms. In the corporate world, Matlab is expensive (compared to university or student licenses) so free development tools like python or Excel VBA is perferred by companies. I think Octave or Minitab are free.

1

u/fatimalizade Jul 06 '25

Thanks for your answer