I went to a physical chemistry class as an English major

I’m an English and psychology major. But after spending the better part of a semester hearing from my roommates about the woes of chegs, as chemical engineering majors like to call themselves, I thought it might be time to give it a try myself. So I decided to go to physical chemistry (or P. Chem––chegs love their abbreviations).

The night before the class, I asked my roommate to tell me about physical chemistry. She said it was all based on Schrödinger’s theory. I thought, “Great! Something I can understand: cats!” (Disclaimer: physical chemistry has almost nothing to do with cats. Huge disappointment).

I asked her how confused I would be, and she said, “I think you might actually understand P. Chem.” She was very wrong.

I woke up the morning of P. Chem wondering why I had agreed to go to class on a Friday. But somehow I got myself out of bed, into my winter coat (sad, considering the fact that it’s April), and headed to class.

The only time this will ever happen.

Most of the chegs in the class didn’t make it at all, so I think I can officially say that I was more of a cheg than most chegs that day. The teacher asked if there was a holiday that he had forgotten about, evidently not understanding that Friday After Feve is a locally recognized holiday on campus.

I didn’t get the “bring two pen colors” memo

Class started out great. The professor’s South African (I think) accent made me feel like I was right at home in Anre’s Intro Psych class, albiet with a lot less cursing. He said we would be talking about spins, orbitals, molecules, and angles. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but spins sounded fun.

And I don’t know if “squiggle” is a scientific word, but he used it several times, and I thought it lightened up the lecture a bit.

Then it quickly went downhill.

When the prof mentioned that 1 is a triplet state and 0 is a singlet state, I realized that I no longer understood the numbers 1 and 0. Then he moved on saying, “Let’s go through a more complex example.” Which was funny because I thought that redefining the numbers 1 and 0 was complex enough.

Later he said “Let’s not make this complicated” before writing an equation on the board that dealt with electrons,vectors, angular momentum, quantum numbers, spin-orbit coupling, and probably lots of other stuff that I didn’t write down.

I did learn a few things though. I learned that high spin states are lower energy, rubidium is a heavy atom, and that molecules with heavy atoms often end up in triplet states. I also learned that selection rules are rules that are made to be broken.

In other words, all chegs are rule-breakers.

Most importantly, I learned that P. Chem seems like it could be interesting, but not interesting enough to make me change my major to chemical engineering. Sorry roomies, but I’ll leave all the engineering to you from now on.

Time to go back to being an English/psych major!