Why I hate Chemistry Departments

I decided last week that I hate Chemistry departments. I don't hate Chemistry--I almost majored in it in college--nor do I hate Chemists. Nonetheless, there is still something about chemistry departments that makes me deeply miserable, and I think that the greatest challenge I will have to overcome in grad school will be to figure out how to learn chemistry from the wonderful chemists that surround me in our department without falling into a pit of despair.

I first realized that I hate Stanford's chemistry department about three years ago, when I was a sophomore in college and was taking Quantum Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry, and had declared myself a chemistry major. By then, I had been working in a biophysical chemistry research lab for a year. I enjoyed research a lot--I met smart, fun, interesting people who shared many of my interests. I liked working on my own project, and even though it had not been going so well for the last six months of that year, I still valued working on it. Since I had all that going for me, I figured I could declare chemistry as my major, study it, and go on to a happy grad school in the sky.

But I was wrong. Mostly, I hated my classes. My biggest hate was Analytical Chemistry Lab. I think it was because I perceived that the TAs hated me. One of my TA's would go on and on about how lazy we Stanford students were compared to her undergraduate university (which, in case anyone is wondering, was not MIT). Ok fine. We are lazy. So I came to lab feeling not only bad about how I didn't understand the lab, but also feeling horrible about myself because clearly, this is even an easy class compared to the *real* chemistry classes out in real universities. Now, as a grad student, I look back and think "well it was just a lab class, it doesn't really matter." But it did really matter to me at the time, and being surrounded by TAs who resented having to teach me did not really encourage my love for the subject at all. Now I realize that many TAs resent having to teach because they have a lot of work to do themselves. My TA probably did not personally hate me, because I doubt she cared enough about me to really feel hate. I was just one of the many frustrations in her life, and a graduate students' life is filled with frustration. And the way one of my current labmates put it is this: Grad school is set up such that grad students always feel stupid. So they take out their feelings of inferiority on undergrads. If he's right, and I'm not sure if he is yet, this is probably what was happening in that lab.

Quantum Chemistry was the class I had been waiting to take for all of college. I tried to enjoy it at the time, but looking back, it was a major disappointment. I came out of that class with an appreciation for quantum mechanics, but with absolutely no intuition for it. I was sad. I wanted intuition. I wanted to understand what that spin-spin splitting that we had learned about in the context of NMR really was. And I wanted to understand what resonance structures really were. And what orbitals really were. And what the Stark effect was. I thought it was reasonable to expect to get this kind of understanding from a class that called itself quantum chemistry, but I was wrong. And it wasn't entirely for lack of trying. I read the textbook, I did the homeworks, I went to office hours, and I stayed after class asking the TA's lots of questions that, most of the time, they couldn't answer. What stands out in my mind the most was the introduction of spin. Spin is crucial to everything in science, and I am not even exaggerating--I am plagiarizing. The great David Chandler told me (and the rest of my Statistical Mechanics class) last semester that the difference between bosons and fermions is the most important distinction in all of science, because without it, you wouldn't have electrons, or the Pauli exclusion principle, or atoms or molecules...or proteins, or anything else that is Good in life and Fruitful for science. And so, given the importance of spin, and the distinction between fermions and bosons, you would expect--or at least hope--that a Quantum Chemistry class, the only quantum mechanics class required for chemistry majors, would teach people this loud and clear: Fermions are particles with half-integer spin, and bosons are particles with integer spin. And you would also think that in order to teach people this, you would tell them what spin is in a way that they can understand, or at least use.

I didn't get any of that from my quantum chemistry class. I also did not do too well in it (I got a B+). I was sad. Were it not for the experiences that were to follow, I would probably just assume that quantum mechanics is beyond me. Fortunately, I had a wonderful boyfriend who suggested that maybe if chemistry wasn't making me happy that I should major in something else. And when I replied that I was too incompetent to major in anything else, he dismissed these insecurities as being stupid. So stuck between stupid and stupid, I picked the less painful of the stupids. I had decided that if I was going to be bad at whatever it is I would major in anyway, I may as well major in something interesting, like physics. And hey, by the time I graduated with my physics degree, my GPA had gone up and not down, as I had expected.

And I say that not to brag, but to get to the point that mystifies me now. There is this idea in the scientific community that physics is harder than chemistry. I had this idea myself too in undergrad, which is why I felt so much hesitation about majoring in physics. But actually, this idea is kind of odd because the problems chemists try to solve are much more complex than those that physicists try to solve. But the problems in chemistry are so complex that chemists don't have time to go through the basics, and so there is a certain level of basic knowledge (e.g. What is a Hamiltonian? What is Angular Momentum? What is reduced mass?) that is assumed but rarely learned. And that stuff is really important if you ever want to build intuition.

And that brings me to the biggest source of evil in chemistry departments : my peers. And specifically, the hostility that I sense from my peers when I ask questions in class. You could say that this hostility is all in my head, and maybe I am exaggerating it because, yes, I am Jewish, but from talking to people I know that I am not the only one who feels this way. And that is what I completely don't understand. Presumably, we all want to learn chemistry, which is why we're in these classes, and so we should welcome each others' desire to learn. But for some weird reason it doesn't work that way. In the 2 chemistry departments I've inhabited, classes are percieved as a necessary evil, at best. Now, yes, chemistry is difficult. And yes, professors aren't always great, although the ones I've had at Berkeley all have been so far. But I think that as students, we're responsible for our own education and ultimately we have to make sure that we learn. And that is why I ask questions--to make sure that I learn the material. I'm about 90% sure that (most of) my questions aren't completely retarded. And yet, somehow, I do not feel asking questions is something that students feel comfortable doing, even when they are confused, perhaps because they are intimidated. I think this is bad, and more specifically, counterproductive. And maybe because everyone thinks that they should understand everything, or have seen it somewhere.

I think it comes back to the fact that a lot of basic knowledge is assumed in chemistry, but never really taught, so many people use terms that they haven't precisely defined (such as "coupling") and use shorthand notation (because writing out wavefunctions in full is too cumbersome) where a slight "typo" on the blackboard could completely change the meaning of the equation. This all makes me nervous and uncomfortable; in a safer environment, I can generally ask questions. But a chemistry department is not safe. Questions are not welcomed, since they are seen more as an annoyance for everyone than an opportunity for everyone to learn.

A postdoc in my lab said that it seems like physicists embrace each others' quirkiness more, whereas chemists are in general more socially conscious. I agree that this is true, although my evidence is not statistically significant. Still, I doubt my experience is unique--Stanford's chemistry department lost quite a few undergrad majors, and of the ones that stuck to it, a good number hated it. I don't know why. And even though I'd like to change things, I don't think it's in my power, at least not now. Now, I think, my objective is just to survive this hostility, and to extract all the wonderful knowledge that chemistry professors have to offer without becoming horribly depressed, like I did three years ago.