CM4258 - ADVANCED POLYMER SCIENCE

Course Overview: The first half of the course (Weeks 1 to 6) covers various types of radical polymerizations such as metal-mediated radical polymerization and atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), just to name a few. In the second half of the course (Weeks 7 to 13), supramolecular chemistry and dendrimer synthesis was covered in detail, followed by the use of polymers in various semiconductor materials and other applications such as how organic field effect transistors work. 

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Overall Difficulty: Difficult

Difficulty of Assessments:

• CA1: Easy 

• CA2: Difficult 

• Presentation 1: Easy 

• Presentation 2: Difficult 

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Pace of Course: Just Right 

Duration provided to prepare for Tutorial: 1-2 days 

Workload of Course (Average Number of hours spent per week): 

To learn the content: 7 hours

To complete assignments: 2 hours  

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How did you find the contents (how it was delivered) and the assessments of the course? 

The content covered in this course was rather interesting and eye-opening, but it was quite content heavy in the sense that the content covered for every lecture are based off multiple literature research papers to supplement the main topic covered. Truth be told, I was kind of lost throughout the whole course as it felt like I didn't know what I didn't know, or rather I didn't know what I need to know. Despite this, I would say as long as one understands the rough gist of the concepts covered in the lectures without fretting too much over what was covered in detail from literature papers, you should be fine. There are only 4 tutorials for the entire semester, and the questions are generally manageable, or difficult if you are lost/unsure of the content covered in lectures. I personally found the tutorials on radical polymerizations (tutorial 1 and 2) straightforward, whereas the remaining tutorials 3 and 4 which covered the 2nd half of the course content was kind of daunting for me. For course assessments wise, we had to individually present 2 literature research articles for each individual presentation (2 total) by summarizing them into 20 slides, and thereafter having a Q&A session with the Prof. The second presentation was quite difficult as one needs to summarize details of what was going on for the second half of the course which honestly was extremely hard to digest and summarize. For the 2 CA quizzes administered throughout the semester, I would say if you studied the tutorials diligently and given the fact that the quizzes were open book too, you should be fine for CA1. I can't say the same for CA2 though, as even though the Prof claimed that CA2 was gonna be way easier/easier than the tutorial questions, that didn't seem to be the case when all of us flipped open the CA quiz. Famous last words indeed :s 

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How was your experience with the course? 

Overall, an eye opening and interesting course which delves really deep into the particular topics covered. Content may be very dry/abstract at first (and some of them are still till this day), but once one gets the gist of what is being mentioned/implied then this course overall may seem manageable. Otherwise, I would say the content covered may be challenging/difficult if you don't put in the time to understand, or intend to chiong last minute like me. 

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