Chemistry

An Open Letter to Scientists, Aspiring Scientist Types, Might-be Scientists but Not-quite-sure-what-it-means Types:

Maybe you’re an aspiring doctor, or an aspiring pre-med, or you aspire to be an aspiring premed, but don’t really want to deal with all the perspiration. Or, maybe just maybe, you just happened to like AP chemistry.

Take a look at the chemistry department.

Dear Students-who-forget-what-a-“mole”-is: there’s always room in economics.

Artsy-types-looking-for-interesting-ways-to-fulfill-a-Core: Stay away, for your own good.

Chemistry concentrators run the gamut from future Ph.Ds to future investment bankers to future tree huggers.

Once you’ve hurdled the initial requirements—intro chem, intro bio, intro math, intro physics, intro blah blah boring Science Center lecture course blah blah, and, finally, organic chemistry—you can meet the concentration requirements with as few as four more courses, leaving you plenty of electives.

The first two years are usually spent getting “gen chem” and orgo out of the way. If you can still remember from high school what “pKa” means, or you’re willing to go look it up, make sure you leap straight to orgo as as freshman. Most concentrators choose the Chem 20/30 sequence, rather than the more pre-med-filled 17/27 sequence.

Chem 20 tends to be a bit easier than the information-crammed 17, but 30 is much more difficult than the cushier-in-comparison 27. In the end, your choice doesn’t really matter, but it’s important to work your tush off in the first semester, or else the second will be a complete waste.

The first two semesters of organic chemistry have rightly earned their difficult reputation and send a few students packing to other fields of study. But even poor experiences (and poor grades) in orgo don’t signal future failure in the upper-level courses.

The gentle introduction to the post-Chem 30 world is the odorous Chem 135, “Experimental Synthetic Chemistry.” If you ever plan to work in a chemistry lab in the future, or you’d just like to play around with chemicals ranging from curiously dangerous to don’t-you-dare-drop-that dangerous, button up your lab coat. The course mostly consists of a weekly marathon eight-hour lab. There, graduate student TFs patiently guide clumsy undergrads through the ins and outs of stirring, pouring, clamping, filtering, and cannulating (nothing too raunchy, don’t worry).

Having Chem 135 tucked into your academic pocket protector is an indication to most professors that you can handle their lab research—and you can. Between sophomore and junior years, most concentrators begin looking for a lab to work part time in for course credit.

Don’t limit yourself to Mallinckrodt Hall, either: opportunities abound in other chemistry-related departments, at the technical school down Mass. Ave., and at the Medical School. The department’s undergrad advisor, Gregg Tucci, can help you match your interests to a professor, but do your own research, too.

Make sure you talk to other undergrads or grad students in the lab try to get a sense of what the work atmosphere is like, because some labs—particularly Prof. David A. Evans’—are known to be particularly competitive once you’re there. Don’t be afraid to jump ship from a lab before the end of add-drop period if things don’t look peachy. Thesis-ing isn’t routine, so if you have something worth writing up, you’ll be publishing it in the big-boy journals.

But generally competition is mostly with yourself. Yes, 95 percent of the class can’t be in the top 5 percent, but chemistry concentrators are hardly waving machetes at each other. Collaboration on problem sets, when allowed (and it almost always is), is routine and often invaluable. Many concentrators want the requirements out of the way so they can explore other courses or their own research.

The gem of the department’s course offerings is Chemistry 285, “Human Disease: Molecular Etiology and Mechanistic Pharmacology,” a once-weekly three-hour lecture which invites scientists, entrepreneurs, and ethicists to speak on a dozen issues at the intersection of modern medicine and organic chemistry.

Last year, a few of Harvard’s top scientists, such as stem cell demigod Prof. Douglas A. Melton and former National Institute of Mental Health chief (and now University provost) Steven E. Hyman dropped by, as well as a few HMS researchers and pharmaceutical company executives. And what course on medicine and society wouldn’t be complete without a visit from Prof. Michael J. Sandel himself?

But beware, for all the dazzle of the star-studded cast, the problem sets and exams are, well, Chem 30-esque. If you can survive the graduate-level work and the graduate-level grading (sorry, no breaks for undergrads), you’ll gain an amazing understanding of medicine at a molecular level.

Don’t think you have to conquer the department’s dozen organic courses before exploring more discrete pastures: the physical chemistry requirement awaits. While Chem 60, “Foundations of Physical Chemistry,” sounds like it might satisfy the requirement much more easily than Chem 161, “Statistical Thermodynamics,” don’t swoon for the lower course number. Chem 161 is something of a physics-lite course, replete with a handful of physics concentrators. Give it a chance if you can hack a few Taylor expansions, or just appreciate the easy-to-follow full-color lecture handouts. The biological applications will at least keep your ears up, and Prof. Xioawei Zhuang is one of the perkier members of the department. If, however, you prefer consulting numerical tables to learning a few easy integrals, stick to Chem 60.

A warning: one intermediate course is worth approaching only in full chemical safety gear. Chem 154, “Crystal Symmetry, Diffraction, and Structure Analysis” is a how-to course for grad students who wish or have been ordered to become their lab’s resident crystallography guru. Everyone else should stay far, far away (like, humanities-elective far away) from the course’s incomprehensible lectures and incoherent assignments.

Any course heavy with freshmen is not exactly representative of the rest of the department’s offerings. There’s more to chemistry than Life Science and arrow pushing, and there’s more to science than just chemistry—concentrating in chemistry will, ironically enough, make it easy to transcend both.