nerdo

How do these undergraduate chemistry programs compare?
MIT
University of Texas- Austin (Honors)
Rice
UC Berkeley

I know that MIT is great. I know Berkeley's chem grad school is awesome but don't know if it applies to undergrad as well. The other two I don't know how to judge. Any chem majors out there? Any advice would be great.

tintin220

I'm also going into chem and I believe MIT's is natoinally #1.

PiperXP

I have a friend at the US Naval Academy who was told by a professor that the chemistry she was in was one of the hardest in the country - only outperformed by MIT =D.

That said, I think MIT and UCB are probably higher than UT Austin and Rice on that list. But this is just personal observation (but that's really all you're going to get here). You could look up rankings online, though remember that there's flexibility in those.

dally

The cool thing about MIT's chem department is that it's pretty small - I think there's only 20-something in the class of 2011 right now. But it still gets a big budget! There's awesome seminars every once in a while and FREE FOOD in the chem majors lounge every Thursday. And they just revamped the lab system, and it seems to be doing pretty well...

I don't know anything about the other places, though. Though I probably should know about Rice....ah, well.

collegealum314

Berkeley's classes are pretty rigorous. And of course, they have the #1 chem dept. overall. MIT is tied with a couple of others for #2, and they have the #1 inorganic chem dept. UT-Austin is a very good dept. It is like #12 in chem. Rice is ok, but it's a well-respected institution for undergrads and they have a lot of smart people. I'm sure the education is great there. Also, buckminister fullerene (buckyballs) was discovered there.