“This is not what I thought the class was going to teach,” said one stoner.
Photo by Amit Roth
In an effort to “weed out the weak,” the UC San Diego Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has decided to reassess course requirements for the 2025–2026 academic year. According to a recent email from the university, as a prerequisite to all other chemistry courses, students enrolling in Fall 2025 will be required to take CHEM 1L: Lab Protocols and Precedents in Conduct. “It is vital that our students have all the tools they need,” Department Chair Britta Falterman wrote. “So starting next year, we’ll thoroughly establish a proper style for writing and data presentation before they display unproductive individualism. Science is competitive, and it is our duty to build competitive scientists. We realize this type of course is not for everyone, and we as a department will always be here to remind you that you still have time to declare a different major.”
Falterman described that the value CHEM 1L provides is in its “extreme, simulated competition,” and plans for exam averages to hover around 40%. She explained, “These are our future chemists, they need to learn early that they will fail. A lot. And by God, we will fail them. Besides, as first years they can stand to delay a few courses.”
To put these ideals into practice, Professor Phil Talate prepared eight rigorous experiments for the incoming 200 students. “My two TAs and I are ready to be guiding lights to so many students of unrefined scientific potential,” he said. “Much like real chemical potential, it depends on changing amounts of free energy, and trust me when I say these students will have drastically less free energy outside this course.” According to Talate, by the end of the course, students should be able to read the Raman spectrum of their synthesized metalloid clusters. “It doesn’t matter that most won’t know the chemistry behind what we do yet,” he said, “as long as they know how to write a banging 11-page lab report and copy my Excel instructions. Of course, the course will cover everything to better their understanding of what we are doing. Or rather, the TAs will, I’m sure.”
Postdoc Mae Mann is of a different opinion regarding the new course requirement. In a public Discord announcement on the UCSD Chem & Bio server, she wrote, “I have never in my graduate life been asked for a sig fig. On behalf of the Chemistry Graduate Program, I am appalled at the standards you are held to. And really, whose standards? Gosh forbid we all write a little differently, work a little differently, or publish a little differently. You guys already have it rough with a half dozen required labs, constantly sucking up to research professors, and the mere existence of York Hall. Please, let’s look out for each other, keep humanity in our methods of science, and do lab work in Tata Hall like human beings.”
Introductory-introductory classes like CHEM 1L are not unique to UCSD and have been introduced across the UC system. The new UC Science Department was established to “facilitate the accurate and precise upbringing of the next researching generation until only those capable of following instructions remain,” according to the UC Science Department’s mission statement.
“Especially in these anti-intellectual times, education must be done carefully, but sweepingly,” the newly appointed Chair of the UC Science Department, Stan Dart, wrote in an unread campus-wide newsletter. “The bounds of error shall be kept to a minimum, but the bounds of terror will cease to exist.
Amit is a cog in this machine. But doesn't everything run on optic cables or something?
