Do you want to study marijuana? You can now get a marijuana chemistry degree from Northern Michigan University.
The school is offering students a new program to major in called medicinal plant chemistry. According to CBS Detroit, this is the first of its kind program at a four-year university in the U.S. Classes in the program include plant biology as well as business entrepreneurship.
Brandon Canfield, the associate chemistry professor at Northern Michigan University said to CBS Detroid, “We’re not going to be actually growing anything on campus. Maybe following the 2018 Michigan election, maybe we’ll revisit that depending on the outcome and what ballots are present on that election. But for now, we’re not going to be growing any cannabis. We’ll be practicing extraction and analysis techniques on other plant systems.”
“The need for this is so great. You go to some of these cannabis industry conferences and everyone is talking about how they need labs, they need labs,” he said. “Or the bigger operations are trying to set up their own labs in house and they need trained analysts. And the skill set required to perform these analysis is perfectly matched with an undergraduate level education.”
“I predict that the graduates from our program are going to have among the highest immediate job placement of any of our programs,” Canfield remarked. “People are either going to go out and get jobs or they might go out and start their own business in the industry.”
