The department’s Director of Education prof. dr. Alex van Herk: “We are now one of the first chemical engineering programs to receive the label. So this accreditation is special. As an engineering department, we wanted to test whether we could meet European standards with our ‘pure’ chemistry track in the Master program, which still has a small chemical engineering component, and our Bachelor program, which has a much greater emphasis on the engineering side of things, along with the chemistry content. We received the American ABET accreditation six years ago, but the ECTN accreditation is far less commercial and quite prestigious.”

According to Van Herk, ECTN was actually quite charmed by the combination of a pure chemistry program with a chemical engineering program. The ECTN site visit commentary reports: “The success of the department’s mission, to combine the study of chemistry with that of chemical engineering, is reflected in the commitment of the staff and students, and in the employability of the graduates in the chemical industry. This practice of combining chemistry with chemical engineering is becoming increasingly rare in the Netherlands, but the TU/e remains an example of good practice in this respect.”

ECTN had a lot of good things to say about the programs. Their only criticism was that the website was not yet up to standard. TU/e’s International Relations Office is working to rectify this.

Broader outlook
“Our programs have far fewer choices than others at TU/e because we want people to know something of both chemistry and chemical engineering, regardless of what they decide to specialize in”, Van Herk explains. “And this does actually give graduates a far broader outlook and makes them popular with employers. Also, quite a few of our graduates with extensive molecular knowledge set up their own small companies. This is possible because they know a lot about chemistry but also enough about applications and processes to have the courage to become entrepreneurs.”

Van Herk hopes attracting more foreign Master’s students will also mean that more of them will want to stay on to earn a PhD in the department. “The Netherlands has a shortage of PhD students and graduates in our area - on a national level we needed at least 300 more Master’s graduates per year in the last five years - so we are happy to find foreign talent to take part in our Master programs. More than half of our (PhD) researchers are currently non-Dutch. We don’t mind if they subsequently return home or go to work in the Dutch industry. We are selfish: we just want good people for our PhD programs. We also like to keep in touch with graduates and PhDs, we want them to be part of our international network.”

Staff member ir. Ouafae El Fahmi was also instrumental in gaining the Eurolabel accreditation. She took care of the preparations and wrote the report together with a number of other staff members./.