November 26, 2024, 01:23:36 PM
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Topic: Is a chemistry degree enough to do grad school in developing DFT methods?  (Read 7224 times)

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Offline SheffieldWednesday4ever

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I will be heading in my 4th year of undergrad chemistry, but have 6/10 courses are easy social science/arts/humanities courses I have to take. I'm considering taking more physics/math courses because of this.
Though, I'm doing computational research right now, I am more interested in the devolopment of these methods. Do I need a chemical-physics/computer science/mathematics/physics instead to go into grad school for this area?

Or is a chemistry degree fine? or perhaps I need to take several math and deeper quantum mechanics/statistical mechanics courses?

Offline enahs

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If you have good GPA and good recommendation letters it should not be a problem.

Everybody seems to be ill informed about gradschool.

!= means not equal to

Grad school != you are already supposed to know everything and you use it in research.

Grad school = you are confronted with the fact of how little you actually know and you work your ass off to learn it.

Offline cjcamara

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I'm very interested in this also.  I'm going to grad school this fall and I want to do Theoretical/Quantum Chemistry.  Unfortunately I had a similar undergraduate experience.  I'm absolutely willing to do the extra work but I'm curious what classes/topics/books I should have under my belt that I don't have already.  My manditory classes that I"m taking in grad school are such:

Fall- Quantum Mechanics 1 (Time-Independent QM), Statistical Thermodynamics
Spring- Quantum Mechanics 2 (Time-Dependent QM), Kinetics, Statistical Mechanics

I'm allowed to take at least one more class each semester and while the opinion of my advisor matters most I'm just looking for other people's opinions.

If you go into Physical Chemistry this will be a pretty standard set of classes that you will take.  So you can expect these in grad school OP.

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