Chemical Engineering Overview - PowerPoint - Podcast

	B.S. - Chemical Engineering, India Institute of Technology, Madras M.S. - Chemical Engineering, University of California, San Diego Ph.D. - Biochemical Engineering, University of California, San Diego
	Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering
	"I think that's very important is to be aware of the different social, political, and economic issues that are current. They have a big impact on what types of technologies get pursued, on what types of research gets done, funded, and supported."

Tharakan: My name is John Tharakan. I'm an associate professor of chemical engineering here at Howard University, which basically means I do research and teach, with more emphasis on the teaching. The primary responsibility in teaching is to get information across, and to get information across to your students in a manner in which they are able to understand it. The bulk of my time is spent on preparing for class. So for each hour I might be in class lecturing, I would probably spend about two to three hours preparing for that lecture. Now of course, you've delivered the material, you have to be able to assess that the students have, in fact, understood what you've taught, and so the second part of teaching is evaluation. In a department that offers a master's degree, probably the breakdown is around 40% of your time is spent on research, 40% is on teaching. In a research focused university where the department offers Ph.D. degrees, usually the time split is more like 60% for research and 20% for teaching. The other 20%, is service. This sort of time is time that might be spent on committee work. It might be spent on administrative matters, dealing with students from an advising perspective and from a counseling perspective."

Q: How did you become interested in teaching?
Tharakan: My first experience with teaching was as a teaching assistant in graduate school. After I finished my Ph.D., I went to work for industry for about four years. I decided that the amount of interaction I had with people in industry was quite little, and I was limited in the type of research that I could do, because the research was always focused on what the industry or the corporation was interested in. So I applied for academic jobs because I decided that only in academia would I have the freedom to-or at least a larger measure of freedom to-do research that I was interested in and to teach the kind of courses that I wanted to teach.

Q: What are the responsibilities of a university professor?
Tharakan: The primary responsibility in teaching is to get information across to your students in a manner in which they are able to understand it. The bulk of my time is spent preparing for class. For each hour I might be in class lecturing, I probably spend about two to three hours preparing. Once you've delivered the material, you have to be able to assess that the students have, in fact, understood what you've taught, so the second part is evaluation. This includes assigning homework and problem sets, making up exams and quizzes, and designing projects that the students can get involved in. All these quizzes, assignments, tests, and projects need to be graded. So, on top of the preparation and the teaching, you have to devote time to evaluation-grading and basically evaluating student performance. So if I were to break it down, I'd say probably about 30% of your time is spent teaching, 40% is spent preparing to teach, and the other 30% is spent on grading and evaluation.

Q: How does your time break down between teaching and research?
Tharakan: There are some departments that do not have a graduate program at all. All they do is offer an undergraduate degree. In those departments, there's usually very little emphasis on research. The bulk of your time is spent teaching. In a department that offers a master's degree, probably the breakdown is around 40% of your time is spent on research, 40% is on teaching. In a research-focused university where the department offers Ph.D. degrees, the time split is more like 60% for research and 20% for teaching. The number of courses that you're required to teach every semester or every quarter is much less. In both cases, the other 20% is service-time spent on service to the department and to the university. It might be spent on committee work, administrative matters, advising or counseling students, or other bureaucratic matters.

Q: What do chemical engineering students need at the undergraduate level to be successful in today's market?
Tharakan: First and foremost, they need to have a solid grasp of chemical engineering fundamentals. This includes an understanding of kinetics and reactor design, of various transport phenomenon-such as fluid mechanics, mass transfer and heat transfer, and material in the energy balances. All of these are the core courses within any good chemical engineering program. So you do need to have a good foundation in the basics of the field. In today's industrial and political and social environment, I think it's essential that students also have a good understanding and grasp of matters that don't directly concern chemical engineering, like policy issues or the state-of-the-art in the different areas of research, different technologies. It's important to have a fairly broad perspective on your education. It's not enough to know the fundamentals of chemical engineering. It's also important to know how to communicate them. To see how chemical engineering relates to the world, how it relates to problems that the world is facing right now. These problems might include environmental or energy-related problems.

Q: Why is it not enough just to have the technical skills that a chemical engineering curriculum offers?
Tharakan: One of the main things that you do in industry is communicate. You have ideas, and you work on certain ideas and projects-maybe by yourself, but increasingly it's not. It's as a team. The cooperation within the team has to be very good for the projects that you work on to be successful and that requires effective communication. Team members have to be aware of how their project fits into the overall policy goals of the industry or the corporation, in particular, and also how it impacts society in general. The industry is not just involved in creating products that it sells. It sells them to specific individuals, and they sell them within a certain market. That market, and those individuals, are informed by government policy and current tastes. All those things have a bearing on how a project gets worked out, and how it develops to its end result. Those are some ways that these other considerations, aside from just the fundamentals of engineering and chemical engineering, have an impact on your performance in industry.

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