r/ChemicalEngineering • u/West-Wash4301 • Jul 30 '25

Career Advice Is Chemical Engineering dangerous?

Hi I currently am a high school student and planned to study chemical engineering. It sounds fun to me since I'm good at science and math and like chemistry very much. However I've seen many news talking about the incidents happened around the world on chemical engineers such as explosion in the plant and poisoning in chemicals, they look so dangerous and I can't be sure anymore whether I would go on in this industry... do you think I can still learn it or not?? Thank you for your advices.

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u/wiseguy187 Jul 30 '25

Operators are in the line of fire you'll be in an office mostly doing unimportant things.

10

u/Lucky-Succotash3251 Jul 30 '25

This is absolutely not true if you work in production.

6

u/Lazz45 Steelmaking/2.5Y/Electrical Steel Annealing & Finishing Jul 30 '25

Depends on how they have it set up. My mill is union and we as engineers are literally not allowed to operate a lot of stuff. So what wiseguy said is quite true for many engineers in my mill

6

u/Lucky-Succotash3251 Jul 30 '25

Yeah this will really be company dependent. I work in a small company and engineers are basically maintenance/operators/handymen in one.

2

u/Lazz45 Steelmaking/2.5Y/Electrical Steel Annealing & Finishing Jul 30 '25

We "do" a lot of stuff we are not "allowed" to once we are cool with the operators and they realize we are just trying to help them out/fix things/improve how a product is running, but I can see other places being very strict with that and not allowing engineers to really interface much with units. There are engineers in my mill who are very office focused, while my co worker (whom I share an office with) and I wanna be out on the floor more and interacting with the hourly operators. Building a relationship with them and helping to break down that "salary" and "hourly" barrier