Creation (and Recreation) of a Graduate Core Course in Chemistry

Chapter 5

Creation (and Recreation) of a Graduate Core Course in Chemistry Downloaded by UNIV OF SYDNEY on November 27, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 24, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1248.ch005

Vincent M. Rotello* Department of Chemistry, University of Massachusetts, 710 North Pleasant St., Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, United States *E-mail: [email protected].

Chemistry as a science and as a career choice is evolving rapidly. While considerable thought and effort has been placed into creation of undergraduate curricula to address these changes, graduate studies have not received the same level of attention. This chapter discusses efforts made at the University of Massachusetts to evolve the graduate chemistry curriculum over the past two decades, focusing on the centerpiece of the program, the Graduate Core Course.

Two readily defined goals for graduate chemistry education are knowledge in the field and professional training to help the students in their future careers. While it is relatively easy to obtained consensus on these goals, it is quite challenging to develop strategies to these ends that can be implemented by Faculty, many of which are quite conservative. This inertia is exacerbated by the fact that every faculty member is, by definition, successful. We are also quite confidant that what made them successful will make the next (and the next…) generation equally thrive. When I joined the Department of Chemistry at UMass in 1993, it was quite clear to me that the graduate curriculum was far from optimal. Students were required to “qualify” in three of five areas (organic, inorganic, physical, analytical, or biological.) either by passing the ACS exam in that subdiscipline or by taking a course and passing with a grade of “B” or better. There were multiple issues with that practice First, the students ended up taking full semesters of the two easiest areas outside of their own, which a) limited the “depth” courses they could take

© 2017 American Chemical Society Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

that semester in their area of choice and b) only gave them coursework in a portion of the discipline. A second, more philosophical issue in the prior system was that there was no effort to integrate students’ knowledge and understanding of chemistry. Siloing of knowledge presents a limitation in the ability of scientists to broaden their research outside of standard sub-disciplines, and also inhibits collaboration both across the field and with researchers in other disciplines.

Downloaded by UNIV OF SYDNEY on November 27, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): October 24, 2017 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2017-1248.ch005

Designing the Graduate Core Course In 1997 I started working with Scott Auerbach, a physical chemist (likewise untenured at the time) to revamp the graduate curriculum. Talking with other faculty, we found that the educational wishes of the faculty could be divided into two categories: depth and breadth. Depth represents knowledge and expertise in the student’s subdiscipline, while breadth refers to a broader understanding across the discipline. Our goal was to develop a program that addressed both needs, and preferably provided the students with the opportunity to gain other “soft” skills, such as writing and presentation. Scott and I first thought about the depth part of the equation. Conceptually, it is hard to argue that researchers in different subdisciplines know best what their students should know. Pragmatically, it seemed very unlikely that a couple of Assistant Professors were going to convince their senior colleagues that they had a better way of teaching the required concepts to the students, or even that we were qualified to determine what concepts were important. As a result, we decided that the division should determine depth requirements. As implemented, the divisions required two courses in their subdiscipline per semester. As the field of chemistry has broadened, however, these requirements have been loosened to allow students to pursue directions beyond the normal divisions of chemistry. The breadth issue required quite a bit more thought. Clearly, all chemists work with atoms and molecules, but different subdisciplines can view them in very different ways. What we came up with was the idea of a “Core Course” that would distill the key elements from the subdisciplines of chemistry and present them in a single class. We built off the current structure of the Department, with elements of physical, organic, inorganic, analytical and biological chemistry. Our goal was to provide students review and education in areas that people expect chemists to know. Given the range of science we wanted to cover, we next worked on how to teach the course. Given the topics, we felt that team teaching would be the best way to effectively teach the course, with the added benefit that being able to team teach would make the course attractive to professors looking to balance their research and educational efforts, i.e. the people you want teaching the course. The structure we generated had two professors/semester. The offerings were Fall: Physical and Organic; Spring: Inorganic, Analytical and Biological, with one of the faculty in the Spring covering two areas, e.g. Analytical and Biological taught by a biological mass spectrometrist. 92 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


While our conception seemed reasonable in terms of covering the topics chemistry graduate students needed, there was and still remains considerable challenges in implementation. In particular, it is very difficult to a) distill an area down to its essence and b) get faculty to teach that essence. The fact that we were unable to generate a departmental consensus on what students needed to know meant that that decision was handed to the faculty teaching the course. At times this worked well, with coherent curricula built around physical organic, integrating the tools of computational chemistry with the concepts of organic. Other times things were less successful, with incoherent unrelated topics that were often outside what most chemists would consider required for the discipline. Overall, there are times when the correct faculty align and an integrated view of “chemistry” is presented, and at other times a disjointed set of mini-courses has been presented. The Core Course and “Soft” Skills While coverage of the science material has remained a challenge, the Core Course has evolved into a program that has excelled in providing the “soft” skills required by careers in industry, academics and other areas. In the first year of the class we created a computational chemistry project focusing on the use of ab initio and density functional tools to predict or explain aspects of organic structure or reactivity. These projects were group projects, with three-four students per group. The product of the project was a short research report discussing their results. This assignment served a number of important roles in student development. First, for many students this is the first time they have been asked to conceive of a research project, giving them practice in thinking creatively, identifying a problem, and coming up with feasible strategies to provide answers. It also provides an opportunity to introduce basic elements of scientific writing, including generating a scientific narrative to enhance readability. Perhaps most importantly, the group nature of the project provided a chance for students to learn how to work creatively, and provided faculty with a chance to provide tips to help the students to work together. Building on the perceived success of the computational project, we next created a paper critique project. In this project, the students identify a paper, and create a presentation where one student argues the pro case for publication, one argues the con case, and one serves an editor and renders the decision. This activity provides an opportunity to help students look at the literature in a critical fashion, once again something that many or most of the students have never done. The exercise also provides an opportunity to give students the basics of preparing an oral presentation, where we can teach them basic elements of design and storytelling. At the same time as we instituted the paper critique, we introduced proposal writing as the capstone for the course. In this activity students work in teams of four to five, and are required to generate an idea, a one-page white paper, and a full proposal in the NIH R21 format (one page specific aims/executive summary, six pages of proposal text including statements of significance, innovation, and research design) and a 15-minute presentation. As one might expect, this project 93

Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


is very demanding on both the students and faculty. Coming up with an idea that appeals to the group is quite difficult, and generally requires quite a bit of back and forth communication between the students and the two faculty teaching that semester. Writing the proposal likewise provides substantial further opportunity to help student learn how to frame their ideas textually, and how to create graphics that are informative. And as mentioned above, this proposal really places emphasis on developing good collaborative skills. It is perhaps somewhat glib to categorize the challenges of group projects as an issue of “collaborative skills”. What we have observed over the past few years is that most groups worked quite well, and the students genuinely enjoyed the teamwork aspect of the projects. There was also an imperative for the students to participate in the group effort, since each of them had to do part of the presentation, and (perhaps more significantly) answer questions afterward. Occasionally (~5% of the time) we heard grumblings from team members about either generic or specific teammates. These issues we could sometimes covertly address by asking questions about the project during class time allotted for the work. Pointed questions to each of the members worked well to encourage everyone to know the material, and hence pitch in. The success of this approach can be deduced from the absence of complaints on the students’ (anonymous) course evaluations. We also attempted to have the students do evaluations of teammates, but the normal reticence of students to “rat” on each other made these less than useful. The above being said, we did have one group over this period that devolved into what could be best described as a “Lord of the Flies” situation that required rapid and un-subtle intervention by the faculty teaching the course. This situation was quite surprising, and the best advice I can give is keep your eyes open for body language in the groups. In addition to the projects, we provide multiple “workshops” for the students through the Core Course. These include topics directly related to the projects, such as “How to read a paper—an Editor’s perspective” and “Writing a compelling proposal”. We also have an ethics workshop, where students do case studies and render their verdicts on a range of issues. In the past two years, I have instituted a workshop on leadership: “Managing up, down, and sideways”. In this meeting, Faculty discuss with the students how they can manage up, i.e. work most effectively with their bosses and mentors. We also provide hints on how they can work more effectively laterally, important tools for their collaborative projects. Finally, we have senior graduate students provide advice on how to work successfully with undergraduates, providing a chance for them to learn about aspects of leadership that are rarely provided to students. To provide a better idea of how the course is structured, here is the relevant portion of the syllabus from 2016:

94 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.


Lessons Learned from the Group Activities There have been a number of positive outcomes (anecdotally, at least) from the group projects in the Core Course. First, students have had a much easier time and have done a better job on their Original Research Proposal, a requirement for the degree that they perform in the first semester of their third year. Second, students have had improved writing and presentation skills when they join research groups. Perhaps the greatest impact was surprising, but shouldn’t have been—Core Course instilled a sense of unity into the class. This cohesiveness was manifested in increased departmental spirit, and in a noticeable increase in collaborative research spawned from bottom-up connections initiated between students while in the Core Course. As with all social experiments, issues arose with the group projects. The vast majority of the groups worked quite smoothly, however there were some groups that devolved into reality show-like confrontations. These issues arose from key challenges that we all have, including: who should lead? How do we obtain consensus? What if there are two big egos on the team? In our teaching of the Core Course we learned a few lessons on how to maximize the positive aspects of group work while minimizing the conflicts. First, we found that having in-class time devoted to each of the projects provided 95

Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

the faculty with a chance to smooth out interactions, helping to (subtly or not) direct discussions in profitable directions. We could also monitor the groups and intervene when confrontations were just starting. The second lesson we learned was to mix up the groups for each project—having to work with the same incompatible student for the entire semester created conflicts that were unresolvable.


Where Is the Core Course Going? After almost twenty years, it is now time for us to re-evaluate the role of the Core Course in the graduate curriculum. From the above it is clear that the “soft skills” goals of the course are being addressed better than the scientific content questions. This begs the question of whether the Core Course should focus on building the presentation, writing, and sociological skills required by the students and leaving the scientific content to other venues. This potential of moving the scientific breadth question outside of the course places the design of the Core Course into the broader question of “what does a graduate student need to learn in their classes.” Moving forward, our plan is to start with an outcome-oriented strategy. In this approach we will ask students who took Core Course what they thought was helpful and not regarding the materials. We will concurrently ask research faculty what they would like to have their students know before entering the labs. These will help us plan the new curriculum. We will then work to quantatively assess the success of our efforts through follow-up interviews with both students and faculty. This follow-up process will take time due to the stochastic nature of students and their advisors.

Concluding Thoughts When we started the Core Course it was an experiment that like most experiments had some surprises. But the underlying hypothesis that having all of the chemistry graduate students together would provide an integrational experience has held up. Additionally, the broader impacts of this approach are clear, with enhanced departmental spirit and communication. Overall, the experience has apparently been positive for both students and faculty, however a) there is always room for improvement and b) we need to develop metrics to help us assess and optimize the program,

Acknowledgments The support of the Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement for the Transformational Research and Excellence in Education Award.

96 Waterman and Feig; Educational and Outreach Projects from the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative Undergraduate and Graduate ... ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2017.

Creation (and Recreation) of a Graduate Core Course in Chemistry

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