"The experiential learning is more valuable than the money at this point, " says Nicole Quesada, a McCombs student with a chemical-engineering background who is working on Yoo-hoo.

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But as part of his course work he toured a Magnolia Ice Cream plant with one of his chemical engineering classmates, his soon-to-be wife, and learned of a franchise opportunity.

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Computer science is the third highest-paying bachelor degree, right behind computer engineering and chemical engineering.

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Madhukar joined the business in 1971 after studying chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and a two-year stint at Abbott Labs.

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In a research project conducted during last year's holiday season and posted on YouTube, Bill Hammack, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, concluded that a single-file line leading to three cashiers is about three times faster than having a separate line for each cashier.

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The techniques come from fields such as evolutionary biology, chemical engineering and physics to capture tumor complexity in a few well-considered equations.

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Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at MIT, is a founder of the budding field of tissue engineering--of restoring, maintaining and improving tissue by growing it, in vitro, on a biodegradable polymer (plastic) scaffold.

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