Chemistry is cool, and I’ve read some articles about UChicago’s chemistry major being pretty sparse for undergraduates. The article itself was called “Bad Chemistry” and it was written in 2009. What has happened to the department since then? Any current students willing to share their experiences?
For those reading this now or in the future, this is the article referenced above:
http://chicagomaroon.com/2009/04/17/bad-chemistry/
The claims in the article (from 2009) were far from universally acknowledged. A followup piece was written to provide an alternative viewpoint:
http://chicagomaroon.com/2009/04/21/chem-department-complaints-exaggerated/
As a current chemistry major AND one of the “bloodsucking children of Satan” premeds referenced in the original article, I’d like to defend the chemistry department here. Not one of the claims in the article is (in my experience) defensible, and they are all just plain whiny. I’d like to tackle the authors’ claims point by point before offering my own perspective.
Firstly, I applaud the physics and math departments for their organizational structure as stated in the article (I haven’t fact checked that but it’ll be irrelevant to the discussion). However, the author has not argued anything about the negative consequences of having a full-time professor serve as the undergraduate adviser. I have never heard of anyone have trouble arranging a meeting with the adviser; she is very busy, but also very invested in her role as an undergraduate adviser. The number of grad school info sessions is more than apt for the number of students who plan to apply to chemistry grad school each year. The info sessions are a way for the department to reach out to its undergrads, and if undergrads miss the sessions or are not satisfied, then they can (easily) make an individual appointment. A plurality of NSF Fellowship Application and Goldwater Scholar winners hail from the chemistry department, putting to rest the idea that the department does not advise its students well. Furthermore, I’m not sure what author expects: the department’s job is not to buy pizza for its undergrads (which they generously do at their informational sessions on grad school admissions). The College’s chemistry interest club, Benzene, receives money from Student Government which they use to buy pizza and beverages at regular, if not weekly, meetings.
Consider the flipside of this argument. It’s not that there are no electives, but rather that the department takes the job of undergraduate education seriously enough not to award its coveted B.S. degree until a student has shown competency in all of its course offerings. Furthermore, most students who are serious about chemistry graduate school take advantage of graduate-level coursework within the department - these are the electives that one takes after achieving sufficiently high competency in undergraduate level chemistry coursework. As a fourth-year chemistry undergraduate, the author should have known that is was an option, or he willfully neglected to provide that information.
I can’t comment on the state of faculty evaluations in 2009, but today all chemistry students (majors or not) are required to fill out a course evaluation form that has sections for reviewing not only the lecturer but also TAs and the quality of lab experiences. This is on par with most departments and I would not feel it fair to criticize them for not doing more.
TAs in the math department also have no experience teaching when they first TA classes. I actually appreciated having TAs just one year removed from college because the empathized with undergrads more than a jaded, upper year grad student. The requirements on first year chemistry grad students are also quite light - yes they take their own classes and start rotating in labs, but they consistently cite that the grades they receive in their classes don’t matter (they don’t really - no professor or outside entity is going to review their grad school transcript when hiring them) and that they face only minimal expectations for the productivity of their lab work since professors understand that they are taking classes and have TA duties. All the TAs I have ever had in chemistry were genuinely excited and happy to teach their undergrads. In contrast, I found math TAs to be far less accessible and intellectually removed from their students due to the experience gap.
This is somewhat true. However, it is by no means exclusive to the Chemistry Department or even to the University of Chicago. Every top research school (like UChicago) will brag to prospective students about how much professors care about undergraduate teaching, and every students who believes that will be mildly disappointed when they arrive on campus. In my experience, I’ve found that my best teachers were often the ones who secretly didn’t care much for or even loathed teaching, while my less than stellar lecturers were those who actually cared a lot but didn’t have the skill to translate that passion (this is from talking to graduate students in each of these professors’ labs).
I’m not sure how to respond. I personally enjoyed learning about redox reactions and Gibbs free energy in general chemistry, and my friends also enjoyed it or at least were indifferent. I wish the author could provide some concrete suggestions for how professors should share their passion better, for as of now his points amount to simply whining.
I struggle to envision a scenario in which a professor was “aggressive and rude” or “made students cry” in front of a 200-person lecture. In fact, 90% of students don’t even interact with the professor over the course of the term. If students cried, that was probably because a student performed poorly rather than a result of the professor being mean to a student.
Overall, I’ve found the chemistry department to be populated by fantastic professors who on the whole are good at teaching and understand that it is their job to help undergraduates, be it through career advising or mentoring students in their labs and writing recommendation letters for scholarships and grad/med schools. The classes are harder and more in-depth than those at peer institutions because they care about students and perhaps would be bored otherwise. The distinction between “Honors” and regular level coursework allows students to choose their level of intensity, a degree of freedom not shared by most peer institutions. Labs are usually not graded on the actual results of an experiment (even in o-chem), because they mess up easily (especially in o-chem); rather, students are graded on the quality of their reports, and are encouraged to consider sources of error and why experiments did not proceed as well as planned.
In my previous posts regarding premed attrition rates at UChicago, I’ve documented how the course enrollment in chemistry courses is largely stable during each academic year, providing evidence that most students do not quit out of a fit of GPA-induced fervor. Classes curve to a B/B+ for general chemistry, a B-/B for organic chemistry, and B+/A- for Honors courses, which is very fair and a far cry from the old days of grade deflation that used to be rampant at UChicago.
Chemistry at the University of Chicago has a long and storied history, and the department is no joke in the world of academia. There are 18 Nobel Prize winners in chemistry associated with the university, and more if you count the Prize winners in physics who advanced knowledge of physical chemistry. If you or anyone has specific questions about the department, I’d be happy to answer them!
@ramboacid thanks for the thorough posts. For an incoming freshman who took honors chemistry in Junior year, wants to go into something in the physical sciences (eg geophysics but thus far undecided) and has also done AP physic but no other super advanced Chem or physics in high school, would you recommend general intro Chem or honors Chem to start with?
So what about department trajectory? I’m not a rankings whore but the ARWU showed a relatively precipitous drop in rankings from 2009-2014. I don’t believe that a department can be boiled down to a few data points but I do believe in trends. There’s a similar slope for math as well but I don’t think anybody could credibly criticize UChicago math.
Maybe the NRC report using 2005 data that was released in 2010. That would explain it I guess. And the NRC ranking from 2010 are plagued with criticism and seem like BS tbh.
@MindLife I think you might have an edge with an AP Physics background, as the physical concepts are what trip most students up in general chemistry. If you’ve done some calculus in calculus as well (either AB or BC Calc), then you should be fine for Honors General Chemistry. As always though, the placement test people are very good at getting students into their right level, so you should stick with whichever level you are placed into unless you have reason to believe otherwise. As a blanket recommendation, students who place into a level higher than they believe they are ready for are advised to stay in that level for the first 3 weeks (or 5 in the case of math courses). That gives them enough time to judge their preparedness for the class without compromising them should they choose to drop to a lower level.
@MurphyBrown In retrospect, that sentence is confusing, so thanks for pointing it out. I mean to say that many popular, good teachers do not actually enjoy their jobs as teachers. They are likable and energetic and put on a good show for the class, but that doesn’t mean they really care about teaching or take teaching seriously. Thus, these teachers also tend to make their classes easier both to reduce complaints from students and to reduce the burden of effort on their own part. Meanwhile, many teachers who enjoy teaching and actually care about student learning are not necessarily well-liked: sometimes this is because they are less than stellar communicators, or because they put a lot of effort into planning their classes and thus make them fast-paced and difficult. However, these teachers are often those who make extra effort to assist students in office hours and provide extra materials for students to learn from. I am thinking of a nontrivial number specific teachers when I say these things, some in the chemistry department and some in other STEM fields. There’s not always a tradeoff like I described above i.e. some hard teachers who care about student learning are also excellent lecturers and some easy teachers who don’t push their students are poorer lecturers, but in my experience the two criteria often are tradeoffs. My issue with the author’s point is that a professor’s interest in teaching is largely uncorrelated with the students’ perception of the quality of the professor’s lectures, despite inevitable assertions to the contrary.
@Trickster2212 I haven’t been following AWRU rankings, but I wouldn’t put stock into them. Those kinds of rankings tend to measure metrics related to graduate level study. As an undergrad (or even as a grad student), rankings will have no effect on your education or opportunities (especially in STEM fields, where your mileage depends more on your own achievements than riding the coattails of university/department prestige). I would have actually thought the rankings would show an improvement given that the department is expanding its number of faculty rapidly and is poaching world-class chemists (particularly in organic chemistry, which is historically weaker at UChicago than physical/theoretical chemistry) from other leading institutions. A cursory review of the department’s faculty list shows 3 new additions this year, as well as a similar number being added in the previous two years (some even as full professors with tenure, a tactic used to poach top researchers who have not yet reached tenure at their previous institutions. This was the case with a professor two years ago who was being courted by both UChicago and Cambridge; only UChicago offered tenure and was able to nab the professor.)
OP - this might be of some interest to you.