Planning to major in chem, good colleges?

modestmelody
Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:46:23 +0000

I wouldn’t worry about specific schools yet. What I can say is the most important thing is going to be opportunities for research and a good culture around having meaningful mentorship as a researcher. Access to graduate coursework is also a huge plus in my mind and has made a big difference for my fellow chemistry concentrators.

Look for a culture of undergraduate research in the sciences, smaller lab groups (you want to work directly for the PI on your own project, not for a grad student or post-doc or not through multiple layers of a large group). You want to go somewhere that has a good culture of giving students publishing credit when they deserve it, and you want to go somewhere that’s also going to give you a strong teaching experience. Especially in chemistry, in my experience at many schools, teaching quality differs tremendously and may be the difference between being motivated to keep with it or causing you to “cool out” or “burn out” (depending on how you look at it) on science.

Also, LACs send huge numbers of people to graduate programs in chemistry, with Reed definitely being on the top of that list, IMO.