This was my penultimate quarter at American Cyanamid. Speaking broadly about my time working there, although there were some aspects I liked (and I'm certainly thankful that the job mostly paid for my undergraduate education), overall I didn't enjoy the experience.
Part of my discontent was simple displeasure about having to get up early for a long commute five days a week. More specific to the job was an underlying worry about the dangers of working in a chemical plant. I didn't experience any inordinately unsafe conditions, it's just that such an environment is innately hazardous - at the plant I worked in, one of the reactants (propylene) was flammable, a byproduct (hydrogen cyanide) was poisonous, and the product itself (acrylonitrile) was toxic, and possibly carcinogenic.
In one specific instance, while serving as a "safety buddy" (keeping an eye on an engineer who was working in a hazardous area), I remember thinking "this is the most miserable I've ever been in my life" (which speaks to the lack of hardship I experienced during my middle-middle class upbringing, but was still an accurate sentiment). I know I'm whining, but my categories of grievance included: temperature (it was very cold that day), muscular fatigue (the engineer was up on a distillation column taking a slow-flowing sample, and I had to crane my neck to watch them), audiovisual overload (my line of sight was right into the sun, and I was standing amidst noisy equipment), hunger (it was lunchtime), nausea (a nearby acid tank was emitting foul odors), and boredom (the protracted task was challenging only in a "test of stamina" sense).
There was another source of angst - the plant stirred controversy by disposing of waste products via "deep-well injection" (pumping it underground); the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic was not a fan. I recently searched for scholarship about this practice and turned up "Stochastic modeling of flow and transport in deep-well injection disposal systems" from the August 1993 edition of the Journal of Hazardous Materials (the source of the attached image). The study suggests that Cyanamid's use of deep-well injection was safe; hopefully the model is accurate!
I took the job due to its proximity to home - I wasn't planning on a career in the chemical industry, and my experience at the plant did nothing to change my mind (that bit of career-path affirmation was a silver lining, I suppose).