The Best Pizza in Texas?

This past week I continued to work on my ISM research and went to Dallas to have lunch with my mentor. I researched the career outlook for being a chemical engineer in case I didn’t want to pursue computational chemistry. I enjoyed Olivella’s Pizza (allegedly the best in Texas, but I’m not so sure of that) and got to discuss my future plans, both for this ISM year and into college, with Hao. I learned more about what being a chemical engineer entails and how that is different from studying chemistry as a major. Right now, I would rather study reactions and chemical principles than pipelines and industry setups, meaning I’d rather pursue chemistry, but chemical engineers do earn higher salaries. If I were to continue with the computational side, my mentor advised that I should instead study computer science because there is much more money and opportunity in that field right now, though that’s likely to change as the machine learning hype dies down. Of course, there’s plenty of time to consider specialization later, but hopefully going on interviews with chemical engineers, wet chemists, and computer scientists who specialize in the natural sciences will help me narrow down my field of study. This week, I plan to continue compiling sources for my annotated bibliography and to look deeper into the idea that Hao proposed for my focus this year.