Sunday, November 26, 2006

On the state of our education ^^ - From MCS President

Fellow chemists,

Recently, representatives from our undergraduate student body gathered to discuss the current state of our education here in the McMaster Chemistry program.

The group quickly agreed on the overall exceptional performance of instructors, staff, and teaching assistants however, universal satisfaction soon turned to heated debate upon the discussion of the facilities McMaster makes available to us and the restricting effect it has on the chemistry we are able to explore.

 As a collective of young scientists, we express grave concern that today's undergraduate chemistry student is losing sight of many important facets of the natural sciences. Particularly, we deplore the limitation of our pursuit of education to scheduled lecture periods and three-hour laboratory sessions.

In response to this, we have received permission to establish a novel option for collaborative instruction in chemistry - external to the department. Right now, we are granted a trial run in January, in which chemistry students from all years of study are invited to participate in a two day course of rigorous investigation in a highly-specialized area of research. The current proposal for this year's inaugural project is:

"The limits of human ethanol ingestion and related effects on solid-state dihydrogen oxide wintersport and relaxation under reflux conditions"


In short, we're all getting crunkt, going skiing and hottubbing. Brrrap!

When: Friday January 12 2007 - Sunday January 14 2007
Where: lodging/"conducting experiments" in Penetanguishene, skiing at Mount St. Louis Moonstone
A detailed itinerary is soon to follow. Sign up with your year-rep begins this week!
Cheers,