CM3131 - APPLICATIONS OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY
Academic Year 25/26 - Semester 1
Assessments:​
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Quizzes: 10%
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Assignments: 30%
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Midterms: 30%
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Finals: 30%
Lecturers: Dr Michael Yudistria & Dr Xu Hairuo
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Difficulty of the course: 3/5
Pace of the course: Just right
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Workload of Course (Average number of actual hours spent per week)
​To learn the content: 1 hours
To complete assignments: 2 hours
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REVIEW
What advice would you give to someone considering taking this course?
SF: It's very important to have a good grasp on the first half of the course, which is a quick rundown of the fundamentals of quantum chemistry, statistical mechanics and kinetics. These concepts are integral to the second half of the semester, which focuses on the applications of these fundamentals, so pay very close attention.
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What did you enjoy or find most useful from this course?
SF: If you haven't had the chance to learn them previously, CM3131 will teach you some useful concepts applicable to a wide range of Chemistry. For me, these were steady-state approximation and the molecular partition function. One of my favourite parts about CM3131 is how lectures are paced. Usually, lectures don't cover too much content, because most of the time is spent deriving equations. For people who don't care for derivations, this is good since you can just skip to the results for a quick summary. For those who enjoy derivations, it's a good chance to follow along the lecturer and get a deeper understanding of the material.
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What aspects of the course did you find most challenging, and why?
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SF: For a lot of people, the computational chemistry assignment proved to be quite difficult. It will most likely be your first experience with computational chemistry, and lack of familiarity can cost quite some time.
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What resources did you find most helpful in helping you better understand the course material?
SF: For the computational chemistry assignment specifically, you might want to look into installing Gaussian on your own device, although you do need a license for which you can try emailing the lecturer. If you are already familiar with other quantum chemistry packages like ORCA and have access to the NUS High-Performance Computing Facility, don't hesitate to ask the lecturer for permission to use these resources to speed up your assignment. When writing the report, I found that it helps to consult research papers on computational projects, so you can get some understanding of what parameters researchers probe and how they present their data. For lecture material, I find that the course content deviates a lot from what most textbooks teach. Another problem is that the course content is quite broad, so trying to refer to other resources tends to lead you into deep and unfamiliar rabbit holes. Stick to the lecture slides.
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What other courses do you think should be taken before or concurrently with this course?
SF: CM3192 and CM3141. CM3131 will give you a good understanding of the physical experiments in CM3192. I think something that's quite underrated but important is that the schedule of assignments/CAs for CM3131, CM3141 and CM3192 lines up quite nicely. The CM3131 midterms come after recess week, and the first half of CM3141 is mostly qualitative so it's quite lax. This allows you to focus on the higher workload of CM3192's achem portion during the first half of the semester. In the second half, CM3192 winds down with pro formas, and CM3131 has no final CA, so you get to focus on CM3141. Lastly, both CM3192 and CM3141 have no finals, so you get to focus on CM3131 during exam week.