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A typical week of a chemistry student

Any chemistry students out there!

I would be very grateful if you could share a glimpse of what your weekly schedule is like as a university chemistry student :smile:
Original post by gsxrjunkie
Any chemistry students out there!

I would be very grateful if you could share a glimpse of what your weekly schedule is like as a university chemistry student :smile:


This maybe a tad late but since it's still unanswered I'll give you a schedule of what my typical week was like in my first year at Oxford. I'm not sure what level of detail you were hoping for but I'll try my best :smile:
-Lectures are every morning from Monday to Friday, from 9am-11am (ie. 2 lectures), without fail haha. It happened twice that we didn't have a 9am lecture but unfortunately that is a rarity. Hence in total 10 hours per week.
-Labs on a monday and tuesday from 11am-5pm, which does sound horrendous, and some of the physical labs are, but in reality if you don't screw around you can get done by 3/4 so it's not that bad. Averaging out to 9/10 hours per week.
-Maths classes every week, ranging from just the one hour to two/three depending on your maths tutor. Essentially you get one problem sheet for maths every week and then you go over it in the class, plus any practise papers you might have had to do, etc. So about 4 hours per week including the worksheet.
-Physics classes a few times a term, which was strangely infrequent but again similar to the maths classes, you get a problem sheet in lectures and you go through it in the class. So in the week in which you have a physics class you have an additional 5 contact hours (including doing the problem sheet)
-Additional problem classes for physical and organic with a PhD student which is usually once a week for 2-3 hours in which you go through additional questions which are relevant to that week's tutorial.
-Finally, tutorials. This may be different at other universities, but every week you usually have one tutorial, in which you get a short reading list (essentially your lecture handouts and standard textbooks) then you answer the attached questions and hand it in. Then you have a class with your tutor (one of the professors) with one or two other people and you go through this worksheet and then answer new unseen questions. Including completing the reading, questions and the class itself it's around 8 hours a week.

Totalling all that up your contact hours per week range from 32 to 40 which does sound like a lot but you still have plenty of time to socialise, go out and be active in a society or two. It is a lot more time-consuming (read: work haha) when compared to most arts subjects but as long as you don't hate chemistry it really isn't too bad. I hope that helps, if you were looking for something more about the social life rather than the classes then I'm really sorry :tongue:
Reply 2
Original post by theCreator
This maybe a tad late but since it's still unanswered I'll give you a schedule of what my typical week was like in my first year at Oxford. I'm not sure what level of detail you were hoping for but I'll try my best :smile:
-Lectures are every morning from Monday to Friday, from 9am-11am (ie. 2 lectures), without fail haha. It happened twice that we didn't have a 9am lecture but unfortunately that is a rarity. Hence in total 10 hours per week.
-Labs on a monday and tuesday from 11am-5pm, which does sound horrendous, and some of the physical labs are, but in reality if you don't screw around you can get done by 3/4 so it's not that bad. Averaging out to 9/10 hours per week.
-Maths classes every week, ranging from just the one hour to two/three depending on your maths tutor. Essentially you get one problem sheet for maths every week and then you go over it in the class, plus any practise papers you might have had to do, etc. So about 4 hours per week including the worksheet.
-Physics classes a few times a term, which was strangely infrequent but again similar to the maths classes, you get a problem sheet in lectures and you go through it in the class. So in the week in which you have a physics class you have an additional 5 contact hours (including doing the problem sheet)
-Additional problem classes for physical and organic with a PhD student which is usually once a week for 2-3 hours in which you go through additional questions which are relevant to that week's tutorial.
-Finally, tutorials. This may be different at other universities, but every week you usually have one tutorial, in which you get a short reading list (essentially your lecture handouts and standard textbooks) then you answer the attached questions and hand it in. Then you have a class with your tutor (one of the professors) with one or two other people and you go through this worksheet and then answer new unseen questions. Including completing the reading, questions and the class itself it's around 8 hours a week.

Totalling all that up your contact hours per week range from 32 to 40 which does sound like a lot but you still have plenty of time to socialise, go out and be active in a society or two. It is a lot more time-consuming (read: work haha) when compared to most arts subjects but as long as you don't hate chemistry it really isn't too bad. I hope that helps, if you were looking for something more about the social life rather than the classes then I'm really sorry :tongue:


Thank you so much! This is exactly what I was looking for 👍

wow it does sound like a lot!

Thanks once again, all the best with your studies 😃
Reply 3
Original post by gsxrjunkie
Any chemistry students out there!

I would be very grateful if you could share a glimpse of what your weekly schedule is like as a university chemistry student :smile:


My average week as a first year in southampton included:

6 one hour lectures of chemistry (2 organic, 2 inorganic, 2 physical)
3 one hour lectures of my optional module
A lab on a monday 1-6pm
An organic tutorial (1 hour) or a physical/inorganic workshop (2 hours) - you'd only have one of these a week, they'd alternate every week so you'd do organic the one week and inorganic the other
A tutorial for my optional module (1 hour)
A compulsory maths workshop (2 hours)

Hope that helps :-)
Reply 4
Original post by NicCx
My average week as a first year in southampton included:

6 one hour lectures of chemistry (2 organic, 2 inorganic, 2 physical)
3 one hour lectures of my optional module
A lab on a monday 1-6pm
An organic tutorial (1 hour) or a physical/inorganic workshop (2 hours) - you'd only have one of these a week, they'd alternate every week so you'd do organic the one week and inorganic the other
A tutorial for my optional module (1 hour)
A compulsory maths workshop (2 hours)

Hope that helps :-)


thank you! It does help so much 😃

how do you find chemistry? Is the content difficult to understand??
Reply 5
Original post by gsxrjunkie
thank you! It does help so much 😃

how do you find chemistry? Is the content difficult to understand??


It's really interesting, I enjoy it anyway! Some concepts can be kinda difficult (inorganic for me) but with a little work it's doable. Organic mechanisms and converting between the functional groups requires quite a bit of memorisation but that's really about as hard as it gets in first year.
Reply 6
I
Original post by NicCx
It's really interesting, I enjoy it anyway! Some concepts can be kinda difficult (inorganic for me) but with a little work it's doable. Organic mechanisms and converting between the functional groups requires quite a bit of memorisation but that's really about as hard as it gets in first year.


if you don't mind me asking, what sort of topics do you cover? You see, I study the IB and take Higher Level chemistry which goes into first year degree level therefore wasn't actually sure how much it crossed over
Reply 7
Original post by gsxrjunkie
I

if you don't mind me asking, what sort of topics do you cover? You see, I study the IB and take Higher Level chemistry which goes into first year degree level therefore wasn't actually sure how much it crossed over


A lot of topics were covered but here's an outline:

Organic
- Structure of molecules (functional groups, nomenclature, optical activity, conformational analysis, IR
- Reactivity (acidity and basicity of molecules, resonance)
- Nucleophilic reactions
- Elimination reactions
- Enolate chemistry
- Organometallics

Inorganic
- Hydrogenic atoms (wavefunctions)
- Lattices
- Ionic chemistry
- Shapes and symmetry of molecules
- Atomic and molecular orbital theory
- NMR
- Transition metal chemistry (crystal field theory)
- Main group chemistry

Physical
- Thermodynamics (entropy, enthalpy etc)
- Quantum mechanics (particle on a ring, Schrodinger equation)
- Kinetics
- UV and visible spectroscopy (Beer Lambert, fluorescence and phosphorescene, absoroption/emission)
- IR and microwave spectroscopy (vibrational quantum states etc)
(edited 8 years ago)
Reply 8
Hi i'm just going into my second year at the university of Birmingham. In my first year we had on average around 10 hours of lectures a week, 8 hours of labs (2, 4 hour sessions) a week and usually a 1 hour tutorial although we would occasionally have 2. Hope thats useful. I think most probably have around 20 hours a week but if you're going to Oxford or Cambridge it will probably be more as they have shorter semesters.
Reply 9
Original post by Domwbafc
Hi i'm just going into my second year at the university of Birmingham. In my first year we had on average around 10 hours of lectures a week, 8 hours of labs (2, 4 hour sessions) a week and usually a 1 hour tutorial although we would occasionally have 2. Hope thats useful. I think most probably have around 20 hours a week but if you're going to Oxford or Cambridge it will probably be more as they have shorter semesters.


Thanks!

All the best for your second year :smile:
Here is another typical chemistry 1st year week.

8 hours of compulsory chemistry lectures divided between Physical, organic and inorganic.
2x3 hours of chemistry labs (most organic, some inorganic, few physical)
1 hour tutorial (depending on the time of year organic/inorganic/physical)
1 hour workshop (more physicsy aspects and some maths)
around 10 hours optional content

Which totals around 26 hours. contact time. Seems fairly low compared to some of the above, so I guess you won't really have an idea of how big the workload is until you are there with every uni doing it differently.
Reply 11
Original post by QuantumOverlord
Here is another typical chemistry 1st year week.

8 hours of compulsory chemistry lectures divided between Physical, organic and inorganic.
2x3 hours of chemistry labs (most organic, some inorganic, few physical)
1 hour tutorial (depending on the time of year organic/inorganic/physical)
1 hour workshop (more physicsy aspects and some maths)
around 10 hours optional content

Which totals around 26 hours. contact time. Seems fairly low compared to some of the above, so I guess you won't really have an idea of how big the workload is until you are there with every uni doing it differently.


Yeah I understand but I was only looking for a general schedule,

thank you!
Original post by gsxrjunkie
Any chemistry students out there!

I would be very grateful if you could share a glimpse of what your weekly schedule is like as a university chemistry student :smile:


first year we had about 11 hours or so of lectures and one 3.5 lab a week

2nd year we had 11 hours of lectures and 14 hours of labs a week

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