Professional Development Seminar

Catalog description

Lectures and discussion by visiting engineers and faculty on chemical engineering, job selection, patents, licensing, ethics, and other professional problems. The course objective is to offer an orientation to the chemical engineering profession and to promote professional attributes such as professional ethics, lifelong learning, and awareness of environmental and societal factors, and to highlight their importance in the career lives of chemical engineers. The course consists of a one-hour lecture each week by visiting speakers and Penn State faculty. For some lectures, reading material is distributed a week before the lecture and in some cases, the students must turn in the questionnaire in which they have to answer various questions related to the topic of that week. The topics vary from year to year, but several key topics are included each time the course is taught: ethics, environmental issues, process safety, patent law and intellectual property, graduate school, and job opportunities in various industries.