Website Profiles Chemistry Careers

A new website aimed at helping undergraduates explore chemistry-related career options will go live by the end of the year. The site, www.acs.org/collegetocareer, is the brainchild of the ACS Education Division.

The College to Career website “will contain information on more than 30 traditional and nontraditional career areas in chemistry, career options within each discipline of chemistry such as analytical or physical chemistry, and information on what students can do now to begin preparing for a career in chemistry,” according to Lori Betsock, senior education program manager in the ACS Education Division.

Although ACS has long provided access to career profiles “mainly in the form of pages and pages in a PDF file, we decided that we really needed to update this information and create a Web-based resource that would appeal to today’s undergraduate students,” says Nancy Bakowski, assistant director of higher education within the Education Division.

The site will also feature short videos produced by ACS Webinars and the ACS Department of Career Management & Development that will profile chemists working in alternative careers.

The website will feature a “next steps” section that will point to resources for gaining career skills and for breaking into specific careers. For example, it will include a database of internships and other job opportunities for undergraduates, give tips for tailoring a résumé, and provide a list of ACS resources that can help students move into a desired career area.

“We envision that this tool is going to be used not only by undergraduate students but also by their research and faculty advisers and by those staffing university career centers,” Bakowski says.

Thus far, the Education Division has compiled information on more than 30 career areas related to chemistry such as technical communication, science policy, forensic chemistry, and chemistry and the law.

To expand the site, the Education Division is actively seeking B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. chemists from industry, academia, government, and the nonprofit sector who are willing to submit career profiles. Interested chemists are invited to complete a questionnaire online at fs16.formsite.com/student/form99/index.html.