[Chemical and Bioengineering Program vs Biotechnology?]

**Caveats before reading:**

I completed the Chemical and bioengineering program a while back and may be biased in its favor, but I will try to give the best advice I can.

**Main upsides to the Chemical and bioengineering program:**

Great profs (a bad prof can really make or break your learning experience)

Strong research opportunities (one of the top streams in engineering for hiring summer students)

Many chem eng profs do research relating to bio/medical products with a heavy emphasis on industry partnerships

You still take all the default chemical engineering courses, giving you the credentials to work in a very wide range of fields

Grad school is not required to find work unless you want to be involved in R&D

Flexibility in some technical electives to be able to take courses that interest you and prepare you for the type of work you might be interested in.

Co-op is not guaranteed but easy to obtain. After 1st year is difficult to get a co-op because you have no specialization and education yet, but each passing year makes it much easier.

Can become a licensed engineer if you're interested.

A relatively common pathway both for grad school in medical/pharma work or for medical school.

**Main downsides to the Chemical and bioengineering program:**

5 year program. If you end up not being interested in work that's bio-related then you may feel like this is a wasted year extra.

Engineering degrees prepare you for a broad range of careers, so the first \~2 years are pretty foundational/theoretical which can be less interesting to some. Later years make up for this by focusing on the application of the fundamental skills you've learned, so many students prefer the later courses which feel more like "real engineering"

Some of the foundational bio courses feel too broad for some students. They take some basic microbiology and anatomy courses which may feel unimportant or too far removed from engineering for some students' taste. They form a useful foundation for working with anything pharma/medical related, though.

**Main upsides to the Biotechnology program:**

It seems to be a very practical program with a large number of practical lab hours.

It appears to prepare you very well in a variety of lab techniques.

Guaranteed (mandatory) co-op. (You still have to interview for places, of course, but they seem to have industry partnerships to help you find placements)

**Main downsides to the Biotechnology program:**

Highly regimented schedule, so you take each course at a specific time and have no electives. This can apparently cause some friction if you fail a course because they don't typically run another section of the course until the following year.

Cannot become a licensed engineer anymore, to the best of my knowledge.

Prepares you very well for a narrow range of jobs but also therefore limits the industries you can apply to. This may not be an issue if you're passionate about the specific jobs the program prepares you for.

Most people taking Btech programs seem to gravitate towards project-based masters degrees rather than research-based ones. I am not sure what the prospects are like for progressing from this program into a PhD if long-term research is your main career goal.

**TLDR:**

I know that the chemical and bioengineering program offers a strong pathway towards medical/biological research if that's something that interests you, and I personally had a very positive experience with it. Its main weakness is the length of the degree, if you aren't sure you want to pursue biological-related work.

My understanding of the Biotechnology program is that it teaches you amazing practical skills to work as a technician but may make the transition to grad school slightly bumpier or may prepare you for a narrower range of careers, which might not be a problem if you're confident that you want to pursue those careers.

By GentrifiedBacterium [https://www.reddit.com/r/McMaster/comments/1gol6c1/eng_b_tech/]

Tron II here. I have a bunch of stuff that I wrote at one point, here's a summary.
**TL;DR:** Tron is very good in theory, but fails hard in practice. For coops, you have to work on your own. 2nd year isn't great, but might get better later on.

**Coop:**
All other streams are more specialized in specific jobs that you apply for. Why would someone hire a Tron student over a software student for a coding job? You have to work outside courses and build your skills, portfolio and learn on your own. Harder to get a job, but you can get into a broader range of jobs (provided you have the skills, which you have to work for)

**Organisation, structure:** *(2nd year opinion, please get an upper year's opinion too)*
Horrible. They keep changing the program often, and it usually doesn't feel right. 2 courses this year teach the same thing for over 4-6 weeks. Only takeaway from the whole 2nd year was learning C, and an EngPhy course involving circuits.

There's no synergy between different courses, which is pretty sad and irritating. It's like giving you a penny and an eraser. What are you gonna do with both of them? How will you use them effectively? Tron has a good concept behind it. A combination of mechanical, electrical, software. In practice, it fails hard. There is no proper link between the courses. You won't hear this from Eng Advisors or Recruitment teams, cause their job's to keep students in Mac *(issa biness, gimme da moneh)*.

**Example:** 1P13 was praised as the pinnacle of engineering courses last year, during it's conception. It was supposed to combine 1C03 (CAD), 1D04 (Python), 1MM3 (Materials), 1P03 (Engineering Professionalism). How well did that go?

However, situation might be better in the upper years, so I'm hoping someone can give their opinion about it.

**Mech courses:**
Lmao they pointless. I'd rather pick up a textbook and learn about them if I ever need to use them. But you gotta learn that, along with power lines/transmissions.

By RhindorOP [https://www.reddit.com/r/McMaster/comments/mf4p4j/tron_vs_elec_for_my_purposes/]

[...]
**Chemical Engineering**
**Jobs in Canada? Ontario? Toronto**
I can only talk sort of indirectly about this because I'm currently in Grad school rather than in industry at the moment. Most people I know have gotten jobs in Ontario with a variety of companies: Steel companies, food production, utility companies, OPG. Most of these jobs are in and around the GTA. There are definitely also jobs further away from the major urban centers, with Bruce power plant being the obvious one that comes to mind (especially good pay here, I've been told).
These are just the most common outcomes, I also know people who have gone on to med school or are now working in BC or the US and in different types of work.

**TLDR:** There are plenty of jobs in Ontario, though I assume the job market is slower in general right now with the ongoing pandemic. Most people end up working in Ontario, presumably because that is where they've grown up.

**What do you do in upper-year courses?**
The first half of your degree is heavily-focused on learning the theory you need to understand what will happen when you do one thing or another. We take the basic chemistry skills you learned in High school and first year (and a tiny bit in second year) and learn how we can manipulate chemical systems to our advantage.

We learn "mass-transfer" and "heat-transfer" and then thermodynamics and fluid-dynamics so that we can figure out how we can dump a bunch of raw materials into one end of a production line and get what we want out of the end. We learn to manipulate phase-changes (especially water into steam) and temperatures and pressures to separate things out or efficiently convert one material into another and then we consider how we can accomplish our goals with as little waste as possible (exchanging heat between our material streams, for example).

It's a really interesting sort of problem-solving where you consider things like reducing wood into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and finding a way to convert all that into alcohols that we can then build up into butanol to run a car or a generator with. Then you get to look into where you can get more utility out of each step, like maybe you have to heat the gas to 600 degrees to get the conversion you want, so maybe you could use water to cool the stream and convert it into steam and drive a turbine to get some free energy out of it.

This is all pretty typical chemical-engineering stuff, but we also have opportunities to learn more computer-based simulation stuff or focus more on biological applications (cosmetics, drugs, food, etc.). So let me know if you're interested in those things.

**TLDR:** We learn how to push heat and mass around to make cool products. It's like modern-day alchemy, imo, but with gigantic machinery.

**GPA Requirement:** I've heard it's pretty low, like not far off from 4. Keep in mind that this changes if you're interested in the Chem and Bio (not iBio, different thing) program which has a higher cut-off.

**Is it easy to get co-ops?**
Everyone I know who wanted a co-op found one before they graduated. Most people did some form of co-op or research before they graduated. It becomes easier every year through your degree to find a co-op because you'll have more education under your belt.

**Salary?**
Again I don't know enough about this myself as a grad student, but it can vary a lot between the type of work you do. Some people working for powerplants and in less GTA-ish areas make a lot of money right out of school I've heard (~100k), I think 50-80 is more typical for a first job, but again I can't speak authoritatively on the subject and people's wages tend to change quickly after they start to get more work experience.

By GentrifiedBacterium [https://www.reddit.com/r/McMaster/comments/joy87o/whats_chemical_engineering/]