We have ranked in the top 25 U.S. producers of American Chemical Society-certified B.S. chemistry graduates for eighteen consecutive years. Our Department, along with the Chemical Engineering Department, attracts and graduates extremely capable students, especially in our Honors Program. This is exemplified, at the input end of the educational pipeline, by the extraordinarily high performance level of CHEM-112 chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering majors on their American Chemical Society standardized final examinations. At the output end, two additional objective measures of excellence support the above claims. Five times in the past seven years, one of our graduating seniors received the ultimate undergraduate scientific accolade - a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship.
Undergraduate research is a very important part of our curriculum.
Up to eight full-time research scholarships are available for our majors during the summer preceding their junior year. Our department was one of the founding schools, in 1936, of the Intercollegiate Student Chemists. Ours is the only department that offers a Ph.D. in chemistry that has consistently participated in the annual ISC Convention. Unfortunately, records for ISC awards prior to 1949 have been lost. Since that time, undergraduate students from 53 schools in the Middle Atlantic region have received awards for their research presentations.