Chemical engineers design, develop and validate the processes behind today’s most useful materials and products. Think electric car batteries, antibiotics, biodegradable plastics and even food production. They are critical to sustainable solutions, global innovation and economic growth. Chemical Engineers frequently work across teams of engineers from other branches of the discipline, so it’s crucial to have a broad understanding of general engineering and its applications. At Lancaster, your first year is dedicated to exactly this, and you’ll share this experience with all our School of Engineering students, regardless of their specialisation. We think this makes you a well-rounded graduate, with excellent teamwork and communications skills, prepared for a career pioneering the materials, technologies and processes of the future.

Our four-year BEng Hons Chemical Engineering with Placement Year degree starts with your general engineering first year and includes core themes of design, materials, thermodynamics and heat transfer, along with mathematics.You’ll specialise in chemical engineering from Year 2, developing your core skills as an engineer. Get ready to use team working, creativity and technical skills in your project work as you design to solve real-world problems. You’ll do it all in state-of-the-art facilities across our two engineering buildings.Returning from your placement, one of the highlights of Year 4 is solving a whole plant design project over the course of the year. Working in a group, you’ll be taking on conceptual design and evaluating the economic, safety, legislative and ethical assessment standards. It’s a fantastic opportunity to develop project management, team working and technical writing skills as well as studying industrially relevant processes. You’ll also learn about the business and entrepreneurship side of industry too.

In Year 3, you will undertake a year in industry that will enable you to apply the knowledge and skills learnt so far and gain invaluable experience. We have extensive links built through our leadership in research and have students undergoing placements with multinational corporate companies to smaller specialist SMEs. Once you have completed your placement, you will write an extended reflective piece about your time spent with the company.

You will develop valuable transferable skills that make you highly desirable to future employers, such as working in collaboration, communication, and using modern computer programs as part of the design and manufacturing process. You will grow skills in analytical thinking, logic and reasoning, digital proficiencies and the ability to consider and maintain work safety practices in a range of environments. With a year’s experience added to your CV, you will be a standout graduate.

- We have a close community where the staff to student ratio is brilliant, so everyone is known by name, which provides a personal learning experience.- All of us engineers share the same newly-built facilities. With two dedicated engineering buildings, you’ll find us working on materials in a lab, getting to grips with integrated software in the computer labs, or working collaboratively with lecturers and friends in specially designed social spaces.- We benefit from industry input into the degree, and from the multidisciplinary approach to learning. All of the disciplines are connected in one way or another so the experience gained here can be applied to loads of different career paths.