Students should be provided with ample opportunity to interact with other chemistry professionals, including visiting scientists. The Department is deeply concerned with making the study of chemistry intellectually stimulating. A major challenge is to induce students to think about chemistry and chemical problems much or most of the time, not because they are forced to do so, but because they find chemistry exciting. For example, chemical concepts should be consciously introduced in a way that binds a student not only to the concept itself but also to the logical framework and experimental findings underlying it, thereby stimulating the type of thinking that can lead to further development of the concept. The Department embraces the notion of approaching new material from within a reduced context.
Chemistry is sufficiently complex that it is very difficult to decide where to begin teaching it.
The most widely accepted strategy today for addressing this complexity has been to begin by teaching broad, relatively abstract, higher-order principles that arch across many fields. There is increasing evidence that this does not work well, however, so the Chemistry Department has committed itself to a reform in which we will begin by exploring with our students a smaller set of more nearly observable phenomena. In this scheme broad principles will of course still be taught, but they will be presented as an outgrowth of phenomena observed within a narrower context. In particular, it is this reduced context notion that is the rationale for our Organic First curriculum. To many, the interrelationships between ideas and data in science provide a powerful aesthetic stimulus.