Program Description

Chemistry is a highly interdisciplinary subject that impacts all areas of life. The Graduate Program in Chemistry has both the flexibility and diversity to prepare students for numerous employment opportunities, both in academia and industry.

The First Year
Students spend the first year of graduate study on coursework, choosing a research advisor and fulfilling the teaching requirement. Upon arrival, students take placement exams in organic, inorganic, biological, and physical chemistry.
Subsequently, students meet with their first-year advisors to determine which courses they should take and begin the process of selecting a research advisor. Any student whose test results suggest that they are not adequately prepared take one or more upper-division undergraduate courses to obtain the necessary background.
Conversely, transfer credit may be given for graduate courses taken elsewhere. In the second semester, there is a heavier emphasis on courses in the student’s area of major interest. Ph.D. candidates are expected to accumulate credits in any six graduate courses and earn a minimum average course grade of B.

One of the requirements of the first semester is Chemistry 531, a course in which students attend a series of open houses around the department and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. These open houses provide students with an opportunity to discover the different research options at Stony Brook through informal discussions at poster sessions hosted by research groups. Students are expected to find a research advisor by the beginning of the second semester, a process in which they are assisted by their first year advisor. Chemistry 532 is a course in the second semester in which both faculty and graduate students attend a seminar given by the new students on their proposed research topic. Many students get an early taste of lab work by starting research in their second semester and taking only two formal graduate courses.

The Second Year and Beyond
At the end of the first year, the Graduate Program Director appoints an Advancement to Candidacy Committee (ACC) for each student. Each ACC consists of three members: the student’s research advisor, a professor in the student’s major area, and a faculty member outside who may be of that area. Soon after the first summer of research, the student meets the committee, submits a written report of research done, and then defends the research project in a verbal presentation. The purpose of the meeting is to ensure that the student understands the larger picture underlying the project. These “first meetings” result in the Committee’s recommendations to the student for further study, and to the faculty for the student’s qualification to the M.S. or Ph.D. programs. After that, the paths of graduate students temporarily diverge: the organic students take monthly cumulative exams on new literature and seminars, while the physical, biological, and inorganic chemistry students present a report on an assigned or chosen body of literature. A research proposition, a major seminar, and the thesis defense, including a seminar on the thesis research, round out the students’ sessions with the ACC.

The research proposition is an important part of the advancement to candidacy because the proposed research must be distinct from the student’s own thesis work. In this requirement, the student learns how a new idea is conceived, developed, and defended. He or she must consider questions about the practicality of the necessary research, the cost involved, and the value of the conclusions that can be drawn. The best of these propositions eventually become the basis of research programs carried out by successful Ph.D. graduates who enter academia.
In a few instances, the M.S. program is used as an alternative route to the Ph.D. degree. Students who do not initially progress well often begin to blossom as they work on a more well-defined research project that leads to the M.S. degree. In these cases, the ACC recommends re-entry to the Ph.D. program. Several alumni of the master’s program are now considered to be among our most successful Ph.D. candidates and graduates.

Seminars are part of the program throughout the graduate school years. These seminars are given by world-renowned scholars from universities and from industrial and government laboratories. This program serves to broaden the horizons of our students further and to show them the immensely wide scope of chemical science and its applications to society.

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