It's a long walk to Mallinckrodt, and once you've gotten there the chemistry courses are hardly worth it. Currently, there is general dissatisfaction with the curriculum -- especially lower level courses -- offered by the Chemistry Department. And these grumblings are more valid than the normal gripes of the lazy pre-med or the over-zealous chem concentrators.

The problem is that the discipline of chemistry has outgrown the meager number of lower level chemistry courses that are now offered. The interests of the students who take these courses have become so divergent that they cannot be handled by the present basic sequence of chemistry courses: Chem 1 or 6, Chem 20, and Chem 60. The pre-med finds much of the material that is presented irrelevant to his main interest -- bio-chemistry. The chem concentrator is held back by the large number of relatively uninterested pre-meds in his classes. The instructors are faced with the problem of too much general material to cover in too little time, and have made chemistry courses unreasonably time consuming and lacking in depth.

The solution to the Chemistry Department's dilemma is two-fold -- increase the number of lower level courses offered and program these new courses so that a student can direct his studies into the fields of specialization that most interest him.