Whoa. Moment of clarity. First off, this is my third "real" engineering job despite them all being co-ops it's been a full 40-hour week, working as an engineer doing more or less actual tasks. I don't find much of it that impressive, others might but to me it's much harder to effectively manage people and projects compared to doing engineering tasks.

What both of those things come down, which I just figured out is that I hate being confined by outside forces. That nicely ties up the resume, career, and workplace environment issues that I have. I guess I somewhat understand, but don't necessarily accept why work and outside life are partitioned from each other and don't easily become positive extensions of each other.

There's not too many start-ups in the Chemical Engineering industry that I'm aware of, because that sort of equipment and initial investment is an absurd amount of money in order to do anything useful. Well, unless I do the bio thing or take up fuel-cell technologies that is. Both of which are strong possibilities.