What is taught to Chemistry students and on an average, what does your typical Chemist do?

Chris Langley: What is taught to Chemistry students and on an average, what does your typical Chemist do?
Also, I’ve read that Chemistry students tend to specialize in a type of Chemistry in Grad School, are there any students who specialize or gain further degrees in the Chemistry of Explosives? Similar to what Alfred Nobel did.

Answers and Views:

Answer by Pretty Funkin’ Funny
It depends if you want to do research. I just wanted to do Analytical Chemistry…

Anyways, you’d have to ask your department on specializations as there are numerous fields you can get into.

Answer by Rach
Chemistry students are taught about the fundamentals of matter, atoms, molecules, elements etc. How to make molecules, how to analyse them using spectroscopy/spectrometry/crystallography, how to predict properties of compounds based on the structure, all kinds of things really.

There is analytical chemistry (snore), computational (even bigger snore), inorganic (aka crystal growing), organic, biological (aka pipetting), organometallic, supramolecular.. just to name a few.

In Grad school you do specialise, in fact you become so very focused on a particular topic that you end up writing a book about it, and you hand it in and hope that you will never have to look at the book again for as long as you live.

If you want to get into explosives you would probably be aiming for employment within a government organisation, research in explosives is no longer a huge priority for academic institutions, unsure of whether the private industry does much. I do hope you have low blood pressure cos a career in making things that might (at any moment) go bang and take your hand off is not for the faint hearted.