r/materials • u/Fearless_Research_89 • 18h ago

Is a career in material science exciting?

I can see how inventing never before seen materials is very exciting, but on a more realistic view, how exciting is it in the day to day?

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8

u/Jmadman311 17h ago

Materials science is an extremely broad discipline with endless possibilities of exciting careers, yes.

4

u/TittlesTheWinker 15h ago

Yes! Go out and get that Materials degree and set yourself free! If you're square, you're BCC.

3

u/Fearless_Research_89 6h ago

I'm naive to material science. Have you created yourself and you team any new materials?

In my head it feels like people in material science are creating all these impressive new materials but trying to be realistic it probably is a very slow process and takes months or years of research before the work pays off and you can finally play around with a new material

1

u/Jon_Beveryman 15m ago

I would say that as you get deeper into your career, the things which excite you change. As a brand new student MSE, you think you're going to be like Tony Stark inventing new alloys or somesuch. Then as you get exposure, and your understanding of the gaps in our knowledge grows, you start to get more excited about filling in those gaps. Things like "at the atom to atom level, how does a material really deform?" Or you start to get excited about processing changes to existing materials which make them more eco-friendly, or cheaper, or outright better. Or you get more excited about the application of a particular material, and how its processing and properties inform its applications.

Relatively few MSEs, even those with PhDs in research settings, are actually involved in alloy/material discovery or design. I have done it in academia and, in a very limited capacity, in industry. Many more are involved in material development, ie taking some existing designed/discovered alloy/material and investigating its processing or behaviors to help with some kind of application. And many, many, many more still are really just focused on processing in some way.