By Austin S. Lin
Students and Young Professionals (YP) have lived through what it means to become a chemical engineer in an academic context: late night studying for exams, crunching numbers with your teammates in a unit ops lab, putting finishing touches on senior design presentations.
But what does it mean to become a chemical engineer personally and professionally?
There is an aspect of our profession that continues with us long after we leave our offices, labs, and work sites. What does the chemical engineering life have in store for us as individuals developing our careers and interacting with colleagues across other functions?
The AIChE Northern California Section has been steadily setting the stage for these types of interactions. Over the last couple of years, we have partnered with sister societies such as ACS to hold joint networking sesssions in a mix of social interactions and professional development.
Our YP goal for the current year is to build the professional and personal side of what it means to be a chemical engineer at those borderlands where our professional lives interface with our personal ones.
That’s part of living the life of a chemical engineer.
We’re focusing on a mix of social media, in person interactions and virtual career talks. Our brand new platforms for the year include:
· Twitter (aiche_norcal@) ‐ Featuring announcements for the section, news, and cool things important to YPs.
· Instagram (aiche_norcal) ‐ Photos from events and YP activities. We think of it as a photoblog‐meets‐travel‐documentary for YPs.
· Medium (aiche_norcal@) ‐ We have a new column called “Chemical Potential ‐ The Secret Lives of Chemical Engineers” that focuses on the chemical engineering life, both through stories, memoirs and life experiences of chemical engineers. We will also use this as a platform for interviewing practicing chemical engineers and their own career choices.
· Periscope & Snapchat (aiche_norcal@) ‐ We will be using the real time nature of these platforms to broadcast live from our in‐person events.
Living the chemical engineering lifestyle is no less challenging than our collective academic upbringing, but it’s part of our daily fabric as professionals and as people. Across our global community as chemical engineers, it can also be the most elaborate and amazing of tapestries.
Austin S. Lin is the current Young Professionals Director for AIChE Northern California Section. He works in supply chain manufacturing in the Silicon Valley tech industry and holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
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