We all know that journal articles can be a challenge to read, so how does the general public stay updated about scientific breakthroughs or findings? CHEM 300 is a course that focuses on the different levels of scientific communication and how to write targeting different audience groups.
FORMAT OF THE COURSE
The scheduling was a bit weird for this course. There were two 50 minute lectures and one 90 minute lecture a week. The shorter lectures were very interactive and contained activities that you would not expect in a chemistry course. I remember Dr. Kil made the whole class throw their hands up speaking gibberish just so he could emphasize that embarrassing yourself in a presentation isn’t the end of the world.
The bulk of the work was outside of lecture time, as this was a writing-intensive course. Admittedly, the longer lectures were a bit dry as sitting through 90 minutes of someone teaching you how to write and present can be tedious.
Gpa 🙂 or 🙁
Yes, but it will not feel like that during the course. There are no midterms or final exam for this course; however, the in-class sentence structuring quizzes are killer. Personally, I think there are many ways to write an effective sentence, and that having a definitive right or wrong is not very fair. We were also required to write 3 science- related blog posts, which I enjoyed (pro tip: though the TAs probably won’t admit it, basing your post off a journal article rather than a general topic will get you higher marks :D).
The two big projects in this course were the research paper and the outreach paper. For the research paper, we had to come in during reading break 🙁 to run our experiments. The results aren’t too important, the focus is more on how you communicate them (in our case WHY OUR !@*$!@ RESULTS SUCK). The outreach paper was basically a blog post based off a research paper which you write in a group (easiest marks in the course).
Why I say this won’t feel like a GPA booster is because personally I thought I would be lucky getting an 87, but I managed to get a 94? My classmates also expected the average to be around the low 60s, but the average ended up being 82. Praise the scaling gods. Here’s a distribution from winter 2018:
CHEM 300 grade distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com
VERDICT? TO TAKE OR NOT TO TAKE
If you’re in chemistry, this course isn’t really optional. This being said, I recommend taking it, as it fulfills communication requirements and the overall grading is more lenient than your standard communications courses (ENGL 112/110). I would not recommend taking this if you have not taken 300 level chemistry labs, as running your own experiment will be difficult.