Eleven Students, One College Course, and a First Look at Chemical Engineering

This fall, 11 students at Presque Isle High School will do something most students never get to do this early. They will take a real University of Maine course, for real college credit, before they have finished high school. The course is CHE 112, Introduction to Chemical Engineering — the same class UMaine’s own first-year engineers take.

They will take it through UMaine Early College, which lets Maine high school students earn university credit tuition-free. For a student in Aroostook County, that is no small thing. The nearest engineering lecture hall is a long drive south, and the decision about whether a field like this is even for you tends to get made early, often before anyone has shown you what the work actually looks like. CHE 112 moves that first look up by a year or two, and it brings it home.

The course exists because our president, Carrie Enos, decided it should. She saw that these students were unlikely to encounter chemical engineering early, at the point when it could still shape what they choose to pursue, and she set out to change that. She brought the right people together. Terry Harper, one of our 2026 Teachers of the Year, built the curriculum. Dr. Bill DeSisto, a professor of chemical engineering at UMaine and the coordinator of its chemical engineering undergraduate program, anchored it to a genuine university course. Carrie connected them with UMaine Early College, coordinated the calls, and made sure everyone had the resources they needed to succeed.

This is the work we exist to do. UMaine is working to bring more students into engineering, and we are right beside that effort, always looking for a way to give a student a leg up. This course is one of those ways, and it exists because Carrie believed these students deserved the same starting line as everyone else.

“My goal is to introduce students to chemical engineering and help them begin thinking like engineers — asking questions, solving real-world problems, and discovering how chemical engineering improves lives, strengthens Maine’s industries, and addresses challenges around the world.” — Terry Harper

Here is the part worth slowing down on, because it is the part most people get wrong. When you hear “chemical engineering,” you probably picture a lab. A bench, some glassware, a person in a coat measuring something into a beaker. That image is not wrong, exactly, but it is a keyhole view of a very large room.

Chemical engineering is the design of the processes that turn raw material into the things a modern life is built on. Fuels. Clean water. Medicines. The materials in your phone. It is figuring out how to take something that works once in a lab and make it work reliably, safely, and at scale.

Dr. DeSisto’s own work is a good illustration. When hospitals across the country ran short of hand sanitizer in early 2020, he was part of the UMaine team that spun up its own production and delivered thousands of gallons to Maine health care facilities. That is chemical engineering. Not a coat and a beaker, but a supply chain, a problem, and the people who know how to solve it under pressure.

That is what CHE 112 opens up. Not a career, not a decision anyone has to make yet, but a real view of a field and an honest sense of whether it might be theirs someday. Some of these 11 students will pursue it. Some will not. All 11 will finish the semester knowing something about what engineers actually do, and knowing that a course like this was built with them in mind.

“My hope is high school students will gain an understanding of the types of problems chemical engineering students are trained to solve through an education at UMaine.” — Dr. Bill DeSisto

None of this was inevitable. The course, the credit, the 11 seats, all of it traces back to a decision by our president to look at what these students were missing and do something about it. That is how opportunity tends to work. Someone has to see it first, and then someone has to build it. Carrie did both. What comes next is where you come in.

How you can help

This course is happening because we committed to it. UMPPF agreed to cover the cost up front, for all 11 students, so that nothing stood between them and a real college class. That decision is what turned an idea into a course with a start date.

Now we are asking you to help us carry it. It costs about $250 to sponsor one student in CHE 112, and every gift goes directly toward covering that cost and putting a student in the room.

If you would like to open that door for someone in Presque Isle or beyond, you can give here. Every gift goes directly toward putting a student in the room.