[americanstrat4]

I'm going to be a freshman in college next year and I was wondering, in the opinion of others, which university offers the best chemical education and/or science curriculum.  These are schools that I've considered.  All of the schools are excellent; however, it would be nice to have an opinion as to which one offers the best education in chemical sciences.  Any that are outstanding, alright, or poor in quality?  Please let me know.  

Thanks!

[Donaldson Tan]

How would anybody know practically? To make a fair comparision, one must attend all these universities in order to make an assessment. This is an impracticability, so we are left with reputation research and employment statistics to make guage of these universities.

Personally, since all of them are top-notch American universities, it doesnt matter you enrol in which one. Then we can use another criteria to evaluate these universities. Which one is nearer to home? it would be nice to be able to return to family on festive seasons.

[Donaldson Tan]

LOL. I think we are getting biased votes for UC Berkeley.

I think we have 3 Berkerley PhDs among the staff.

 

I tend to favour public universities because they are cheaper.

UIUC Chemistry Department is very highly ranked too. They are well known for their Specialized Curriculum. http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/chem/

[Mitch]

Its hard to vote because you left out a lot of other great schools.

[americanstrat4]

lol. too many excellent schools may be the problem! it's hard to choose from so many of them, especially when they all have so many attractive qualities.  any input is nice though, lol. thanks for the replies!

[Donaldson Tan]

let's add more schools into the poll:

1. MIT
2. Yale
3. Harvard
4. Caltech
5. UCLA

Any objections? Hehe..

Should we include UK chemistry depts?

1. Imperial College (http://www.ic.ac.uk/chemistry)
2. Oxford University (http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/)
3. Cambridge University (http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/)

Here's a video regarding my college's chemistry department:
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/overview/overview.mov

Imperial College, on top of having the best chemistry department in the UK, also produce graduates who are highly favoured among investment banking and strategic consulting firms. After-all, it is situated in London - the world's major financial centre.

[hmx9123]

I attended U of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign as an undergrad.  I'm at UC-Berkeley now.  A fellow grad student here went to Lewis & Clark.  I voted for L&C because it's a smaller school where you're more likely to get a good education.  While the graduate programs at UCB and UIUC are fantastic, the undergrad programs blow because you are just a number.  UIUC has a little bit better undergrad program than UCB in my opinion, having seen both of them, but that's not saying much.  I'd definitely go small for undergrad and big for grad school.  If I had it to do all over again, I would have gone small instead of big for undergrad.  I've heard Stanford is excellent that way.
  A side note: if you meant by 'chemical education' that you were looking to get into the field of 'Chemical Education', UIUC is by far the best choice.  Their education curriculum is fantastic, and one of the profs there, Dr. Don DeCoste, is not only an excellent teacher, but he does a tremendous amount of work with the 'Chemical Education' curriculum, thus ensuring it's quality.  However, if you were referring to the chemistry education, then my former comments stand.
  One more thing: make sure you like the area and don't go to a school based on reputation alone.  The west coast is a tremendous culture shock to someone from the midwest like myself.  If you're from the west or east coast, it may not be that bad, though.

Geodome: I do object to adding schools to the poll because the original poster said he wanted comparisons between schools that he was looking at, not all of them.  We're not trying to have a competition between schools here.

[Donaldson Tan]

One more thing: make sure you like the area and don't go to a school based on reputation alone.  The west coast is a tremendous culture shock to someone from the midwest like myself.  If you're from the west or east coast, it may not be that bad, though.

This is so true. 2years ago, I applied for undergraduate chemical engineering at UIUC, University of Toronto, McGill University, Oxford University, Imperial College London and University College London. All gave me an offer, but I opted to study in London (UK) in the end, because I couldn't resist the opportunity to study in the world's most vibrant city. If any of you have been to Oxford, you would have known it is a small town 2h from London. The city boy in me would have been very very bored if I studied there.

[lemonoman]

What about schools in Canada...It'll be WAY cheaper too...

University of Waterloo (Yeah, I know, this is mine...but it's been rated #1 in Canada several years in a row by MacLean's Magazine)
University of British Columbia
McGill University in a French city of Montreal, but I think the Univerity speaks English...and the girls are SMOKING hot in that city
University of Alberta

Tuition where I am (Waterloo) costs $4000 for the whole, two-term, eight-month year.  Compare with the private American schools...Just throwing that out there

[arnyk]

What, no Canadian Universities?  

- University of Toronto
- McMaster University
- Queen's University

One more Canadian poster and we'll have named every single reputable Canadian University.

[movies]

I went to Dartmouth College for undergrad and had a great experience with the chemistry department there.  The graduate program is small, so there are a lot of opportunities for undergrads to do research (I worked in a lab for 2.5 years while I was there).  It's great preparation for grad school!  The small department is kind of a curse too though because they can't offer as many different classes.  However, I think that the fact that you can go and talk to pretty much any professor at any time about anything kind of makes up for that.  Most people know at least something about the other fields of chemistry and can provide some guidance even if they aren't really a specialist in that field.

I'm at Caltech now as a grad student and I think it's great for grad school.  I definitely wouldn't trade my undergrad experience at Dartmouth for what I perceive the undergrad experience to be here.  So, even if a university gets a high ranking for their chemistry department, that doesn't mean that it would be a good place to be an undergrad studying chemistry; those rankings are based on the graduate programs.  At a lot of the top universities the professors are much more focused on their research than they are on teaching.  At a place with a small grad program (or no grad program at all) you can expect to get professors who are really passionate about teaching.  (Disclaimer: that's not to say there are not great teachers at larger universities, because there are.)