Hello, I am Dr. Christine Horvat, an Assistant Professor in the program, and today I want to talk about Chemical Engineering at the University of New Haven. If the smiling faces of our students are not enough reason to consider coming to the University of New Haven, I can tell you what sets our program apart from other programs. Our program prepares students for a successful career.
While our faculty perform cutting-edge research, and we have a new Master's in Chemical Engineering and Ph.D. program in Engineering. We focus on excellent teaching and giving more undergraduates opportunities to be involved in research. Because of this undergraduate focus, our students interact closely with our faculty. All Chemical Engineering classes are taught by faculty, not graduate students as you may find at larger institutions.
In addition, we are one of the only Chemical Engineering programs in the country to be housed in a Chemistry and Chemical and Biomedical Engineering department. This means that our students can benefit from a close relationship with the Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering departments. And students can work on research projects with faculty from all of these programs.
Another benefit to our program is our small class size. Our classes average around a dozen students. Therefore, not only do our faculty get to know each student well, but students form a very tight bond. If I ever need to find some of our students, I know I can find a handful of them working on group projects in our Chemical Engineering computer classroom.
Our classes are also very interactive and hands-on. We recently created two new extremely hands-on courses one of which is in the freshman year to give students more opportunities to apply what they have learned using cutting-edge technology. For example, in their freshman year, students designed tubing barbs using CAD software, and then 3D printed their barbs and test them to see if they form a leak-tight seal to connect two pieces of tubing.
Practical experiences like these in the classroom will give you the skills needed to make you an ideal candidate for internships and jobs. Finally, our program offers flexible course choices. Our students are able to choose two Chemistry electives and three Engineering electives based on their areas of interest. Example course cluster options include materials, pharmaceuticals and energy. But our faculty work with each student to determine the most ideal courses to take to prepare students for their dream career.
We also have an option for you to earn a degree with a specific concentration in Biomedical Engineering. Therefore, we have two different degree track options for you to pursue. First, we have our traditional Chemical Engineering degree, where you can choose from a wide variety of elective courses to best tailor your degree to your interests as I described before. But we also have a Biomedical Engineering concentration, where you will take specific science and engineering electives, to gain a strong foundation in the Biomedical field. This concentration will appear on your official transcript for future employers to see.
Not only do students choose their courses to prepare them for future jobs, but they also work in our modern Chemical Engineering Lab. The sole purpose of this lab is for student, not faculty use, for classes, to work on their chemical reaction-driven car for the American Institute of Chemical Engineer's Car Competition, or simply to have real pieces of industrial equipment.
In addition, in many of their courses, students also utilize computer-based data acquisition software, control systems, and process modeling software commonly used in the field. When in the Laboratory, safety is our key focus. Therefore, our students learn while always considering safe practices. One of the advantages to Chemical Engineering is that it can serve as a foundation for a career in a variety of specialized fields. Therefore, we have created three linked graduate programs, where in five years students can earn a Bachelor's in Chemical Engineering, and a Master's in either Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, or Chemistry.
There will soon be four Master's degree options as we are launching a new Chemical Engineering Master's program this coming fall and a linked program will then also be available for a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Chemical Engineering in five years. Benefits to these linked programs include early acceptance to the graduate program, a more streamlined application process, and students began taking graduate courses during their senior year utilizing their engineering electives.
Finally, our Chemical Engineering students graduate on to successful careers. Almost all of our students complete internships or work on research projects before graduating. Here's an incomplete list of where our students have either completed internships, started full-time jobs, or continued on to complete advanced graduate degrees. And our students have been very successful.
This top photo shows Anna, a Chemical Engineering graduate who, after completing two summer internships at different chemical plants for the Albemarle Corporation and being offered a job at Albemarle before the start of her senior year, decided to instead accept a full-time job at Pratt and Whitney.
The bottom photo has Andrew, who in addition to performing research with a Chemistry faculty member, completed two internships, one at Watson foods right here in West Haven, and the other at Siemens in Massachusetts. After graduating several years ago, he began working at CAI in the pharmaceutical industry as a Commissioning and Qualification Engineer. But recently he accepted a new position at Pfizer.
In the top photo here, we have 2021 Chemical Engineering graduate Kiara. She was very interested in Biomedical Engineering and as a sophomore going into her junior year, she completed a summer research program at Louisiana State University, where she worked with cancer cells. She continued to perform research with Biology and Biomedical Engineering faculty at the University of New Haven, and she decided that she wanted to pursue a graduate degree. She is now at Duke University in their Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. program.
Below we have Jordan, who completed his Bachelor's degree in 2022. And he is currently completing his Master's in Biomedical Engineering at the University of New Haven through our five-year linked program. Before his senior year, he completed a summer internship at Callaway Golf, where he worked on the rubber mixing and molding process on their product engineering team and investigated the compression of golf balls.
Without a doubt, our undergraduate-focused program with modern industrial teaching equipment, option to complete both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in five years, and our long-standing history of students with successful careers is the perfect institution in New England to earn a degree in Chemical Engineering. If you are interested in learning more or have questions, please feel free to contact us. If you want to see what our program and students are up to follow us on Instagram. Thank you.