Non-Profit Career in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering

Way back when I first started to consider science as a career, I was pretty sure I had it all figured-out.  I'd find some worthy project, some problem to be solved, and I'd lock myself in a lab and think about it and do a few experiments and maybe I'd teach some classes or have to attend some meetings that had nothing to do with research but mostly I'd make a career of tinkering with test tubes, writing-up results. Then I got a high school internship.  I was feeling pretty good, confident my decisions would be limited to industry, academia or government, and now I could test-drive one of them, would be going to a prestigious undergraduate school, chosen precisely because of its reputation for training women in the sciences.  The only question was which field to major in, but I'd keep my options open, knowing grad school was where the time and place for crucial career defining moves.