How do you pursue a career involving chemistry and healthcare as an environmental engineering major and what are the best paths to get there?

I am currently a junior and just switched from chemical to environmental engineering, and am struggling if I made the right decision. I am really interested in chemistry and biology and ultimately want to go to grad school to study genetics or something to do with medical research. I switched because I was not interested in the industry side of chemical engineering (like refineries and food production) and it seemed like most of the higher division classes were focused on industry. I wanted a bachelors that I could use/enjoy if I decided not to pursue grad school. So I guess my question is can I still pursue a chemistry or biological engineering degree for my PhD? And is there things I can do now that will emphasize more of the chemistry and biology side of the environmental engineering degree? And are there opportunities in environmental engineering (with just a bachelors) to do careers with a focus on health or chemistry? Thank you!

Areas of Impact Environment , Medicine

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Margaret Byron , Penn State University

Answered Monday, February 12, 2024 at 9:31 AM

Hi Jocelyn,
Yes, there are lots of opportunities in environmental engineering to impact health! The one that comes to mind for me immediately is water quality. Plenty of environmental engineers spend their time picking through problems of managing (for example) bacterial and viral activity in drinking and waste water, or (for another example) looking at the chemistry of oil or contaminant spills. If you do end up going to graduate school, you could specialize even further; environmental engineering is kind of adjacent to both chemical and biological oceanography, which seem like they'd be right up your alley (a lot of cool stuff is happening right now with eDNA, or environmental DNA-- I bet you would enjoy reading about this). You can definitely work in water quality or water chemistry with ony a bachelors degree though.

Another thing to remember is that you don't have to go to grad school in exactly the same field as your undergrad major. There is a lot more porosity between disciplines as you get higher up in the academic world. Your best bet is to think about problems that interest you, and see if you can get involved in a research project related to those problems right now as an undergraduate student. From there you will be able to learn more about who else is working on those problems; you will find a mixture of people from across many disciplines. Grad school is much more about the project you are working on and the supervisor you are working with, not necessarily the name of the department on your diploma.

Best of luck! We need people like you!