One professor from the elite Indian Institutes of Technology said to me, "A chemical engineer can work in any field." Hence, whatever you're saying is absolutely correct.
However, I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't alluding to the fact that chemical engineers only work in process plants. What I meant was, your ideas should seem like engineering ideas and not a chemist's ones. Consider the following:
To transform the chlorine into a solution of sodium hypochlorite that the mother can use as a common household bleach; to polymerize the methacrylate into a bright transparent product that can be used in the father's vehicle-light cluster.
When I read this, I thought -- "Why do you want to study engg.? You could have gone for applied chemistry with specific interest in inorganics or polymers."
Thus the engineering idea is absent. You should be able to make that distinction, so that you don't come out sounding like someone who is only interested in chemistry.
An engineering idea is something like this -- "Why does one vehicle-light cluster cost higher than another? Can I find some way to
produce methacrylate so that even the average father can afford the cars fitted with those which presently only celebrities can afford?"
^This is just a crude example, but do you get the general idea?
An engineer doesn't innovate for the sake of innovation. There has to be an economic angle attached to it. Unless whatever you're producing is not affordable, there's no value for all the creativity behind the process of production.
my true interest in the discipline is in developing new processes and products and determining the respective usefulness and applicability.
That's fine, but now consider another possibility: you have a product which has large practical use in the market, and after considerable research you have found at least three different ways/processes of producing that product. For the sake of simplicity, let's consider that product to be sulphuric acid. Now chemistry dictates that all the three processes should give equal amounts of sulphuric acid as determined by the stoichiometric reactions. So which process do you choose? Again, this where a chemical engineer comes in. Chemical engineers only can make the distinction between the processes, and that distinction will not be governed by chemistry. Chemists cannot do that.
This is why it's so important to distance yourself from a chemist.
I intend to exploit
Cool. No problem!