Category: NUS Chemistry

The Department of Chemistry offers a 3-year 120 Modular Credits (MCs) programme leading to BSc degree, and a 4-year 160 MCs degree programme leading to either BSc(Hons) or BSc(Hons) with Specialisation degree.
In Year 1 and 2, you will learn fundamental chemistry principles in areas of Inorganic, Organic and Physical Chemistry. In Year 3 and 4, you will be given the opportunity to further your interest in various multidisciplinary subjects including nanotechnology, chemical biology, medicinal chemistry, materials chemistry as well as energy and environmental sciences.
In addition, as a honours student in your 4th year, you will be given a chance to work in a research laboratory for your Final Year Project, or intern in a related company as your Final Year Internship. You will also be given the option to specialise in either Materials Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry or Environment and Energy.

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The class consisted of 2 lectures a week, and that’s it. All the lectures are webcasted, and the number of students attending the live lectures decreased steadily after the first lecture.

I was not expecting this module to be very difficult as I had some bio background from poly. After taking it, most of the content were already covered in poly, and here they were covered in even less detail. There was no need to memorise almost anything, because Dr Lin believes that understanding is more important, and he only tests on key concepts. In the tests, probably about less than 10% was content that had to be memorised.

But one thing I didn’t quite like was that Dr Lin pretty much read off the slides (including images), which made the lectures pretty dull and boring. From my understanding, he took over the module (and slides and notes) from a previous lecturer, so he might be still getting used to teaching this content. But the style of teaching can really drive some people away from life science / biology / biochemistry.

The module breakdown consisted of a 10% quiz 1 (in-class game format), 30% CA1 (short answer qn), 10% quiz 2 (LumiNUSquiz), 10% quiz 3 (LumiNUS quiz), 40% CA2 (40 MCQ). The quizzes were all shifted online due to COVID.

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This module comprises of a physico-chemical study of the energy resources and the environmental and economic implications of their exploitation. Following the history of energy consumption, the current situation is summarized, and the implications of the continuation of the status quo identified. Concepts of fitness for purpose, and environmental and economic sustainability are explored. Key technologies areas cover generation, use efficiency, and storage and transmission. These are illustrated with quantitative case studies.

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This module was a disaster because everything was webcasted as electures. The electures very rarely bring any form of clarity to the already ambiguous content in the lecture notes. There is a lack of organisation in notes, the ideas are all over the place.

Physical lectures are cut short to 1 hour for going through non-graded true /false quizzes to reinforce on concept. However, the questions were so had phrased that you hardly understood what the question was asking for. The clarification during lectures often leaves you with more doubts than clarification if any because it is usually more on the phrasing of question rather than the concept.

Tutorials were reserved for workshops to draw connection between theory and real life problems. They were complex and interesting if you really like and appreciate them. They do not help you in any ways in understanding what you need to know to tackle exam questions. They are purely for your reference and interest.

There were 3 projects in total. The first was a group project which your group has to research on manufacturing procedure of a product. For example, my group have to find out how to produce ethylcellulose from scratch. From scratch meaning it has to be a starting ingredient that can be bought or easily available.

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This application was produced in partnership with John Metcalf at Sheffield Hallam University as a teaching and visualisation aid to be used in conjunction with supporting lectures. The aim of the application is to allow the user to zoom below the surface of three example elements and to explore their differing crystal structures. As the user zooms under the surface of the beautiful images, the aggregated structure flows into view, then falls away to reveal the underlying crystal structure. 

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Advanced mass spectrometric methods, and scanning probe microscopies form an important group of advanced analytical techniques widely used for research & development, and also for process/product control in advanced manufacturing industries. Microfluidics & labchip techniques, in particular, are increasingly used for biochemical assays in biomedical devices. Students will learn the principles, instrumentation and applications of these techniques, and receive in-depth training in selected advanced analytical techniques, including advanced mass spectrometry (ICP-MS).

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Chemical trace analysis is the use of analytical techniques to detect and/or quantify the presence of very low concentrations of substances. This is important in various industries, including for quality assurance, environmental monitoring, food and biomedical/pharmaceutical safety. Students will learn the principles, instrumentation and applications of trace analysis of both inorganic and organic contaminants, including: sample preparation, measurement methodologies, including isotope dilution, chemosensors and biosensors, matrix effects, sampling bias & statistical evaluation. Students will also receive practical training in trace analysis methodology and instrumentation.

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Workload: Light (Weekly pre-quiz, individual mini-project, group video project)

CM4238 is a fun module which introduces students to computational chemistry. The module is split into two halves and conducted workshop-style in the physics computer labs. In the first half, you will learn how to judiciously run simple quantum chemical calculations on Gaussian for various purposes. The second half of the model deals with MD simulations where you will be briefly introduced to various tools and resources including visual molecular dynamics (VMD), FORTRAN programming, PDB, NUS HPC etc. Do take this module if you are interested to find out more about computational chemistry.

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Part I (Organic): Acid catalysis, base catalysis, transition metal catalysis (cross-coupling transformations and variants).

Part II (Chemical Engineering): Get other universities’ notes or lecture resources and you might get to know what the actual content is supposed to be. I suggest Berkeley’s resources and Wikipedia, for example.

40 % in total for 2 CA tests. 10 % on a long group written report about legislation on chemical practices. 50 % for finals exam.

Pre-requisites: CM3253 or CM3232 to tackle some of the Part II’s tutorial questions. Take note that about half of the tutorial questions weren’t meant to be gone through. Those that were gone through come out for the test and exam with a very high similarity, so you can memorise the answer format from the solutions even if you don’t understand.

Who I may recommend it to: To people who are okay with anything, to people who feels that the organic part can win your heart over, or to people who are interested in knowing about engineering diagrams and the chemical industry’s GDP and employment statistics.

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TL;DR:

This module is not an easy module. Primarily, experimental designs and literature reviews are focused. Having CM3225 may help to give you some edge towards this module but at the end of the day not much.

Longer Version:

This modules builds its chapters from the core concept from the central dogma of biology (DNA –> RNA –> Proteins). The first few chapters acts as a gentle introduction towards the module by having recap of some of the simple concepts covered in year one biochemistry (Would be a breeze if you had taken CM3225 prior to this however, it is not a big deal.)

Following, the syllabus starts to ramp up by blurring the interface between biology and chemistry (Opinionated Perspective: To me this was rather interesting as it not only blur the lines between chemistry and biology but it also seemed like concepts and ideas that were ripped straight out of a sci-fi film.). Some of the things you might expect would for instance includes interesting ideas such as increasing the number of base pairs beyond the standard ATGC, incorporation of unnatural moiety on to cell membranes and principles in bio-conjugation. Another point to note is that Prof Yao usually goes through concepts rather quickly so what I would advice is to pre-read your lecture notes before coming for class :).

This module also focus heavily on literature review and experimental designs. Expect to be reading a lot (easily 4/5 chemical biology related reads per week). The number of literature to review per week may seem daunting however, fret not it does gets easier as time goes by. As a chemistry major student, most of us would probably be confused by the content chemical biology literature however, from the tutorial sessions you slowly develop the capability to pick up key information from a chem-bio literature quickly.

The tutorial sessions in this module serves mainly as a platform for discussion. Students would be expected to pair up and every week two groups would be selected to present on their given article. While the students present would be expected to ask questions/discuss ideas on the given article. Students are allowed to choose their presentation slots so, it would be important that you plan ahead so as to avoid the mid-term periods.

You can also expect an original proposal (OP) assessment that must be handed in at the end of the course. The OP primarily focuses on experimental design in chemical biology where you have to come up with an original experimental design to tackle an existing problem in chemical biology. This in my opinion is the cream of the crop in this module as you would be expected to apply what you have learnt and use it in a dynamical manner to solve problems. Being proactive in your research and asking Prof Yao for feedback on your ideas. Personally I went through about 3 iterations of ideas before arriving at one that I was satisfied with.

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Click HERE to get PSLE & Pri 1-6 prelim exams, papers & answers.