Where would a chemical engineer be working?

After you finish your chemical engineering course and get that degree, nothing else matters.

What matters afterwards would be how you apply the knowledge that you have gained, nobody will really ask you the very fundamental of things, but rather you would be required to solve simple problems.

There are tonnes of options for a chemical engineering graduate to go to, but in reality, in can be broken
down to four simple type of jobs. A chemical engineer is mostly a process engineer, ensuring a process plant, or a petrochemical plant, or an oil and gas plant or any kind of process plant, it can be a simple plant making corn syrup, and your main objective would be to make sure it runs at the full capacity and is making money by optimizing. That's it, simple and straight forward.

Usually a chemical engineering graduate will either be:

1.  An operation engineer, where the engineer will mostly do field work to make sure plant runs.

2. A technical service engineer, where engineer usually solve medium to long term problems and troubleshooting, with minor engineering works

3. A design engineer, this is a "computer engineer", it is very simple actually, you run some process simulations, run some equipment design tools, and show off to your clients as if you know everything. The clients, usually operation or technical service engineers do not possess the tools or knowledge.

4. A researcher handling things like running small scale pilot plants to "invent" new process technologies.

5. Business analyst - you assume everything and people tend to follow your business assumptions. Some technical knowledge would be nice.

6. Any others - these usually are gray areas where chemical engineering intercepts with other disciplines such as control engineers which can be a chemical engineering background or an instrument or electrical background or even system engineering background.

So pick a job that will best suit you.

I love the computers more, so after many years in the industry, that is what exactly I did, but it is good to enter at higher levels. People tend to listen to your opinions more.