Third Year Course
This course builds on the ideas which you have studied in the first and second year, and offers you the opportunity to both broaden and deepen your knowledge of chemistry. As the year progresses there is the opportunity to narrow your focus somewhat, for example towards chemical biology or chemical physics; however, you can equally well choose to pursue a broad range of topics across all areas of chemistry.
Practical work is given a prominent place, and you will continue to develop your skills in this area by tackling more sophisticated and open-ended experiments. The practical skills which you will acquire this year will be very useful to you if you decide to stay on next year and undertake a research project. In addition to conventional practicals, there will be the opportunity to do other kinds of continuously assessed work such as learning a language.
Fourth Year Course
The fourth year – Part III – is in many ways quite different from the preceding years and we hope that you will find that your final year is a challenging and exciting finale to your undergraduate career in Cambridge.
There are just two components to this year’s work. Firstly, a series of advanced lecture courses which will explore topics in which members of the Department are actively engaged. A wide range of topics are on offer, reflecting the enormous breadth of research work undertaken in the Department and each course aims to take you to the ‘research frontier’ so that you can begin to obtain a feel of just where modern chemistry is going.
The second component of the course is a sixteen-week research project covering the Michaelmas and Lent Terms. You have already selected the research group you will work with, and over the coming weeks you will begin to get involved in their work. The experience you have gained in the practical classes and in the computer room over the past three years should have given you a solid base of experience and skills which you can bring to bear on your research topic.
A lecture programme includes three interdisciplinary courses (I1, I2 and I3) in the Lent Term. These courses have been designed to address topics which cross the traditional boundaries between chemistry, physics, earth sciences and geography. One of the courses, I1 Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Change, is hosted by the Department of Chemistry and given principally by our own staff. We encourage you to have a careful look at the other two courses and see if they catch your interest. These courses present a good opportunity for you to widen your horizons.