[joshholloway]

Hello all, I am about to transfer to a university from a community college.  I am going to major in Chemical Engineering and have a few questions.  I have already gone to the community college for a year, and have already taken gen chem I, and I feel as though we did not cover the material very thouroghly.  Now I have two choices, I can transfer to the university in the fall and transfer the gen chem credits to this university and start at Gen. Chem 2; or I can transfer this fall and take gen chem 1 again.  The dillema is that I feel as though if I go into chem 2 at the university I might not be up to par of the other students and might not be ready for the new subject matter.  So I would benifit from taking gen chem 1 again by be served with a more rigorous treatment of the basics.  But this university is $9,500 a semester, and doing this will set me back a whole semester, therefore costing me almost 10,000 more.  And my parents are not paying for any of this, this will all be paid by loans.  Would it be worth it to retake gen chem 1?

[Mitch]

I suggest finding out which textbook they use and how much material was covered and  catch yourself up. You are a university student now, you don't have to be hand-holded through material you were already suppose to learn.

Just do all the problems in the back of the chapters and I bet you'll feel comfortable enough for genchem2.

[joshholloway]

But we did not read the book.  There was a book for the class (Chemistry: The Central Science), but the teacher recomended that we not buy the book.  She only refered to the book 3 or 4 times throuhgout the whole class.  It became evident to me that she dumbed the material down in her lectures upon reading a section from the book after she "taught" us the same material.

The concepts that I DID learn in this class were:
Periodic table, and how to use it.
The Mole concept.
A little nomenclature.
How to balance equations.
Molarity and concentration.
Ph.

...and thats about it.

[arnyk]

Hmm, well I'm not sure how much in-depth you went into that material, but I can tell you that I covered all that in the first 3 units of first year high school chemistry (there were 5 units total).  If my memory serves me correctly, the last two units dealt with gases/atmospheric chemistry and organic chemistry.  Did you cover these?  I find it really hard to believe that chemistry taught at the post-secondary level would teach less material than first year high school chem?

[joshholloway]

Oh yes, we did cover gas laws and the such, I forgot about that.  I understand that stuff pretty well.  But we did not cover ANY organic chem, but that is probably because there is a 2 semester course dedicated to organic chemistry {precariusly titled organic chemistry; just kidding [I don't know what precarius means (must be my community college level education!!)]}  But seriously, what else should I have covered?

[Mitch]

It is spelled: precarious

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+precarious&btnG=Google+Search

You should spell-check and grammar check your posts in the future.

[joshholloway]

I will make a not of that.  Just kidding, sorry buddy.