CM4258 - ADVANCED POLYMER SCIENCE

Academic Year 25/26 - Semester 1

Assessments:

Literature Presentations: 30% (×2)
Quizes: 20% (×2)

Lecturer: Prof Jiang Donglin

Difficulty of the course: 4/5

Pace of the course: Just Right

Workload of Course (Average number of actual hours spent per week)

To learn the content: 2 hours

To complete assignments: 8 hour

REVIEW
What advice would you give to someone considering taking this course?

DolleEicir: Continuation of CM3252. A lot of examples and literature in the slides, so can get lost sometimes, but good if you can the main ideas out of it.
For the literature presentations, start early and expect questions that require understanding of the concepts mentioned for the QnA.

What did you enjoy or find most useful in this course?

DolleEicir: Content is really interesting, especially in the 2nd half, which mentions supramolecular polymers, dendrimers and functional polymers. 1st half was more focused on various types of radical polymerisations that allowed for control and synthesis of well-defined polymers.

What aspects of the course did you find most challenging, and why?

DolleEicir: For the quizzes, not much guidance was given on how the format of the quizzes would be, and only 1 tutorial was done before each quiz. So it is important to be able to have a good grasp of the content, so that you know where to reference it from; quizzes were open-book.
For the presentations, with 3 literature papers to be presented within 21 slides (excluding cover slide) in 17 mins, a great deal of time was spent on summarising and organising the slides, such that the key takeaways of each paper were clearly shown. QnA was also not easy, as they might require you to go a bit further to understand the concepts mentioned in the paper, and to really think through the various considerations the author(s) had when carrying out the experiments.

What resources did you find most helpful in helping you better understand the course material?

DolleEicir: Asking Prof Jiang Donglin was probably the best in this case.

What other courses do you think should be taken before or concurrently with this course?

DolleEicir: CM3252 is the best pre-requisite for this, as it mentions of polymer concepts that are reiterated throughout this course. CM2133 and CM3131 are also good to have, because there is a re-emphasis of thermodynamic concepts (e.g. Gibbs free energy, enthalpy, entropy).

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