As noted in the first chapter, chemical engineering is a broad profession that is critical to addressing many of the issues facing modern society. The intent of this text has been to provide a fundamental understanding of the elements of chemical engineering and to provide a flavor of the challenges that a chemical engineer might face; the quantitative skills developed here are generalizable to problems of far greater complexity than those addressed in this introductory text. There is much more to come to complete a basic chemical engineering education; the core will normally include courses that cover thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, mass transfer, heat transfer, separations, and reactor analysis in depth, as well as a capstone course in design. Other courses in the curriculum will depend on the institution, but will include some selection of advanced courses in chemistry, materials, biology, and mathematics.

Most educational institutions offer undergraduate students an opportunity to do research, and this experience is invaluable for obtaining real insight into the scope of the profession – it is a truism that the research that chemical engineers do is rarely reflected in the courses in the undergraduate curriculum because of time limitations in a four-year professional program, and it is in the research laboratory that an undergraduate student is most likely to see the exciting topics in materials development, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and so forth that were mentioned in Chapter 1, as well as to experience the intellectual excitement that comes with addressing real open-ended problems.