Industrial strength education

It started with a casual dinner and an honest question: “What could we have done better for you?” recalls Mark Banaszak Holl. That night, the University of Michigan inorganic chemist got his answer from his dinner guests, Matthew Remy and Timothy De Vries, former students who now work for Dow Chemical. Nine months later, that answer blossomed into a project to address shortcomings for current and future chemistry graduate students. Banaszak Holl’s former students wished they had had more opportunities to understand how industrial chemistry worked before they graduated and started their jobs. And this desire isn’t unique to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. Chemistry grad students across the U.S. feel underinformed about careers outside academia, as C&EN reported earlier this year (May 9, page 14). To help fill this gap, Dow researchers partnered with University of Michigan chemistry professors and students to develop a case study project that gives graduate