department
chem + chem eng

This class is a lot of busywork. None of the work was difficult, just tedious. If you can keep up with the workload, I think it’s an easy A regardless of your chemistry background. Joseph is an extremely kind professor. During his Monday lectures, he always ensured that everyone understood the material before moving on. In addition, he seemed flexible and understanding with handling accommodations for extenuating circumstances. I would highly recommend his section.

Min is a good person, but his teaching skills are subpar which I understand cause he definitely focuses more on research. He reads from his ppts pretty fast (positive side is that we almost always end early by ~10 min). I ended up not going to lecture by the halfway point of the semester and would read the ppts myself and only watch the lectures if I didn't understand what was going on. The ppts themselves aren't horrible - they're just a regurgitation of the textbook plus some extra sample questions. His way of class engagement (optional) is asking people what the next step/answer to a sample problem in the ppts is, and he does have quite of special way to verify if you truly understand the answer or not: he continually asks you why the answer you chose (correct answer), not another answer, making you second guess yourself. It's not arrogant or egotistical in any way, he's just trying to make sure your understand the logic behind solving what he calls a "standard question." One thing that everyone probably hated was that he assigned all the odd-numbered textbook questions as "homework" (not graded, just practice)... there are ~180 questions per chapter and every midterm has ~2-3 chapters of information on it. No one has enough time to do all those questions. Min also only gave 1 practice exam per midterm, so I had to rely on Savisky's old exams to make sure I covered/reviewed all concepts before each midterm. The quizzes were horrible. They were only 2 questions long (4 points total) and normally 1 mc for 2 points and 1 mc with multiple answer choices correct (didn't tell you how many) for 2 points. Considering 1 point on a quiz is 1 point of your overall grade, they're pretty bad. Also, some midterm/final questions were also pretty convoluted. Best bet to study is his practice exam and Savisky's old exams. It's not worth your time during finals to do all the textbook questions. Pro tip: if you think you're doing badly, everyone else is also doing badly. You don't have to shoot for a good raw score for this class, just beat the curve.

I struggled in this class, but Professor Berkelbach made it so that I struggled far less than I could have. He's absolutely brilliant, an effective lecturer, and a compassionate instructor. He has the unteachable talent of making the course material within one lecture *cohesive*, such that every day is a packet of information that stands on its own, while still having time at the beginning of each class to review the last class and having time at the end of class to take straggling questions. The class structure is intuitive, but I was a little surprised at how many chapters we covered. That being said, each chapter is pretty short, and the textbook Tim chose for the class (Atkins) is a good read with clear explanations. I just didn't read the textbook enough. Another thing that prevented me from doing well was that I barely did the psets: if you stay on top of those you should be fine. I don't have much to say about the class, it's your average stat mech class, but Tim is easily one of my favorite professors in the chemistry department. He really deserves a silver nugget. He's also really nice and got a great sense of humor.

I struggled in this class, but Professor Berkelbach made it so that I struggled far less than I could have. He's absolutely brilliant, an effective lecturer, and a compassionate instructor. He has the unteachable talent of making the course material within one lecture *cohesive*, such that every day is a packet of information that stands on its own, while still having time at the beginning of each class to review the last class and having time at the end of class to take straggling questions. The class structure is intuitive, but I was a little surprised at how many chapters we covered. That being said, each chapter is pretty short, and the textbook Tim chose for the class (Atkins) is a good read with clear explanations. I just didn't read the textbook enough. Another thing that prevented me from doing well was that I barely did the psets: if you stay on top of those you should be fine. I don't have much to say about the class, it's your average stat mech class, but Tim is easily one of my favorite professors in the chemistry department. He really deserves a silver nugget. He's also really nice and got a great sense of humor.

This class was really hard. Honestly, it kinda sucked. Sure, we covered a lot of interesting material and Leighton has his moments as an engaging lecturer, but I think I would've been better off in the large orgo lecture. Although the class is only ~20 people, it was hard to keep up and ask questions at the risk of seeming stupid. There were so many lectures where I was super lost and just wrote down what was on the board and had to study it on my own. The people in the class are pretty intense about chemistry, and some of them have already learned all of the material before. Since the class is completely graded on a curve (your raw scores don't matter, just where you are compared to the average), it felt really discouraging to try your best but be slightly below average because it was inflated by people who had already learned all this in high school. On the point of the grading system: the class was so small and exams were graded subjectively by the TA (no multiple choice, all free response that were given seemingly random partial credit points), so there was such a weird competitive vibe when people were studying. People would put in inhumane amounts of time for this class (like 30 hours over 3 days!) because all that mattered was where you scored relative to the average. If you put in a solid effort and take orgo seriously, you will definitely get solid grade in the regular orgo lecture that reflects your efforts. Here, the average will be inflated and the material will be heavier, and you could try your hardest, but unless half the class does worse than you, you won't be in the A-range. His problem sets aren't graded, but you literally don't learn how to do them in class. The material on there isn't just like a level of abstraction harder than the lecture, rather they have completely new material (new reactions, new reactants) and examples that just relate to the concepts lecture. Almost impossible to take a real stab at them without seeing the solutions. My year, he'd release the solutions Sunday night, and we had a quiz on that week's material in recitation Monday morning at 9am. It was so hard to keep up and actually absorb the content, considering how fast we were going. The exams were really problem-solving based. On one of them, we had to derive the structure of Vitamin D (Google it) from a precursor. Leighton had drawn the molecule on the board once for us, but it wasn't the main focus of the lecture nor was it a key concept of the unit. Literally everything said in that lecture hall is testable material, making it an extra challenge to memorize all of the random, complicated stuff he mentions in class on top of keeping up with the actual orgo material that we were zipping through pretty rapidly. Leighton also did this thing where he made his TA teach how to read an H NMR spectra during reading week (???) because he wanted it to be a 20-pt question on the final. All he did in class about NMR was explain the concepts behind how the machine works. We literally had to learn and practice how to solve that type of problem after the last lecture of the class. Super cute of him to do that. Bottom line: Unless you loooove chemistry and/or have solid orgo background and/or need to skip Gen Chem to get your major(s) done, I would seriously consider doing the regular orgo lecture. Otherwise, prepare for a semester of Googling homework questions and only seeing PubMed articles from 1980 (when Leighton did his thesis) show up.