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A survey conducted in 2015 by the American Chemical Society found that 76% of new graduates in chemistry ended up in industry careers. Even so, David Hamilton felt unprepared in 2020 when he was finishing college and getting ready to make that career jump. C&EN is published by ACS but is editorially independent. "There wasn't a lot of information available out there about what that process looks like," says Hamilton, who left his job as an analytical chemist and is now a PhD student at the University of North Texas. Most important, what skills did industry professionals want chemists with bachelor's degrees to have? To answer this question, Hamilton and his colleagues surveyed chemists from 80 chemical-related companies. The researchers found that professionals want chemists with bachelor's degrees to have some expertise in mass spectrometry, liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy, and infrared spectroscopy ( J. Chem. Educ. 2024, DOI:
Krystal Vasquez (Mon,) studied this question.