What a professional chemist in academia, industry, or a government lab might read and write?

Question

Like professional chemist do different things than the chemistry major students? Students read lab manual, write reports or graph on excel. What do the chemist have to do in their daily work period?

Answer 1

Professional chemists read journals on their specific area of expertise...ie. protein chemistry, carbohydrate chemistry (see http://www.liv.ac.uk/Chemistry/Links/journals.html for a long list).

They read these to learn the latest techniques in their field, and to design experiments to, for example, increase yield, create new product with unique properties (Teflon, etc), and to get ideas for their own work.

They do maintain a lab notebook, write reports, make graphs, give presentations to their lab colleagues, etc., as well as attend professional conferences.

I encourage you to explore the American Chemical Society (ACS) website to learn lots more about the field.

Answer 2

In industry, it will depend on both the industry and the level of employment of the chemist. In pharmaceuticals, your QC bench chemist will read the Pharmacopeia updates so that we know the most current specifications needed for product compliance, the Current Federal Regulations for pharmaceutical production and whatever cGMP/cGLP manuals required by the company. R&D bench chemists will read the same things, but also be expected to read technical publications about their instruments and columns they are developing new methods on. Management level in QC will tend more toward statistical reading as most of their job is data trending and monitoring product stability over the expiration labeling. The companies do lip service in saying that researching new publications that apply to the company is encouraged, but they would rather their chemists be mindless drones producing fast, accurate data than actually improving their knowledge base. Software you would expect to see in Industry will be 80% Water's Empower Chromatography Software and 20% HP Chemstation. The reason most companies use Waters is it was the first truly part 11 compliant software. Varian and Shimadzu software is still something of a joke in the pharmaceutical industry. Empower can work with Access or Excel in data processing, but it is not common to use unprotected spreadsheets in the industry.

Common lab conditions:
No personal computer access, you will share a computer with 2-3 others. You may have email, but do not count on it. Do not expect any internet access whatsoever. Do not expect to have a desk or even a personal work space. Lab space is always at a premium. Also, with cGLP enforcement, testing takes 2 hours, writing up your notebook and reconciling materials will take the other 6 hours.

Answer 3

In the world of acadamia, most chemists spend their time catching up on the latest articles published in well respected journals (some of the more common journals are published by the American Chemical Society for example: http://pubs.acs.org/journals/jacsat/). Of course every person in the world of acadamia's goal is to likewise publish a paper in a journal, and so much time is spent, planning experiments, having them performed, and analyzing their results in the hopes to find something worth of publishing, and having published, in a reputable journal.

A large amount of work is required to get enough information to publish one journal. Many people work for periods of several months to a few years to get enough information to publish a paper.

Answer 4

I stay in usa for 25 years. that's a 0.33 worldwide united states of america this is deep in debt and is performing as a popular worldwide. it is pharmaceutical industry is extremely grasping and corrupt and its government besides, is corrupt to the bone, massive time. Its centers are unintelligent and are failing. the main suitable way is - go away it A.S.A.P. pass to a classic united states of america. i'm attempting, too! i'm caught right here so a ways!

Answer 5

find formulas to invent other formulas.