The Chemistry department has offered Chemistry 7030 as a required graduate student professional development course for many years as a continuation of the series that included Chemistry 7010 and 7020.   All three of these courses are now being augmented with one credit companion course: 7011, 7021, and 7031.   Chemistry 7011 will focus on teaching, particularly

Chemistry.   Chemistry 7021 will focus on communication of Science, particularly to a wider audience and will be initially taught by Marlit Hayslett.  This should be similar to what she taught last Spring as part of Chemistry 7020.   Chemistry 7030 has largely focused on preparing students for the oral component of their upcoming candidacy exams.  Each of you will give two oral presentations that should last ten minutes and will be followed by a fifteen minute discussion period where you will be asked questions.   The first presentation will be on your research project and include its background and motivation and also what progress you have managed to make up to that point.  The second will be a literature review of a paper assigned by your research advisor.

You are expected to attend all of the presentations and are required to submit peer feedback for each.  The peer feedback will consist of a statement of what you thought was particularly well done in the talk and a statement of something you thought could be improved.   You are allowed three absences during the entire semester without prior approval.  At least two days prior to the oral presentation, you are to distribute a one-page abstract of your talk that is to be distributed to the entire class as well as your advisor and other members of your advisory committee.  I will do my best to schedule your presentations on days that when the members of your advisory committee will be on campus.  We will try to video capture all presentations so that you can view them later.