So this year I'm getting to teach PChem this year. Physical Chemistry is the subject that (usually) only pchemists want to teach. As an undergrad, I ended up liking pchem - even after miserably failing the first exam. As a grad student, pchem was okay - I appreciated the complexity, but decided against majoring in that field. I liked it well enough to take some classes in that area in grad school. Pchem is the subject that people will share their horror stories about. It's the class that give chemists and biochemists bragging rights for surviving. Of course, I'm sure these statements get further exaggerated as the years go by:
"My pchem exams took 3 hours."
"Well, my pchem exams would take all day. And we could leave and come back and it wouldn't matter to the teacher - its not like we could go look something up and figure it out."
As one of my students wrote, "My cousin took this class recently and told me it’s a class that while you’re in it you don’t really know what’s going on and once you’re out you don’t really know what happened, but it was cool…"
For the most part, I'm enjoying this class. It's challenging, but my calculus skills have been renewed.
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