Reviews for CHEM484

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Amanda Souna CHEM484 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2023	Dr. Souna is a great professor! Her labs are hard and she is very meticulous about what goes into lab reports, but she makes it really easy to succeed in her class if you put the time into it. She provides the links for the supplemental readings that you can cite in your lab reports, and she is very helpful in her office hours! She not only makes herself very available, but will help with literally anything if you just ask. I learned a lot from her class and feel that I am very good with scientific writing after taking her classes 483 and 484. She is also extremely receptive to feedback. She set aside time to fill out course evals and wanted us to be honest about which experiments she should keep or get rid of and valued our opinions as students. She also was very understanding about issues with a TA and picked up the slack, even to the point of coming into our lab section and helping with data collection/processing, which not many professors would do. She is all around great professor, and despite how difficult she makes the class, I felt that she made up for it in her availability and helpfulness.
Amanda Souna CHEM484 Expecting an A florm 05/22/2023	Compared to the 483 lab, Dr. Souna ran 484 almost exactly the same. The biggest difference was that there was no final exam this time! Instead we had to do a presentation with our lab partner about a relevant lab topic, but these were spread out through the semester so some people could get it out of the way early. The first experiment involved familiar stuff in kinetics and fluorescence. The second experiment focused on nanomaterials synthesis, where we could pick from a few options and design our own experiment by varying some part of the protocol. The third experiment involved a bunch of different methods of spectral analysis (IR, Raman, etc.) for vibrational and rotational analysis, and consisted almost entirely of dry labs analyzing provided data and using MATLAB to fit stuff. Conceptually, 484 was not easy (especially if you didn't have a good professor for 482...) but the TAs were a huge help and were really good at explaining everything. Dr. Souna was also really helpful in office hours. Just like in 483, the grading here was super picky but at least this time you're expecting it. Dr. Souna likes things being formatted in a very specific way, and provides clear outlines of everything you need to include in your reports. The only thing that wasn't clear, however, was how much detail she wanted you to go into about certain things. For instance, she'd say in the discussion rubric "briefly mention this principle" and then you'd write a few sentences about how it connects to the lab, but then you'd lose points for not talking about it enough or not mentioning one very specific thing about it. It got pretty annoying. I'm not sure what the averages were on the lab reports since she doesn't make them visible, but I imagine they were typically around an 85-90%.
Amanda Souna CHEM484 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/18/2022	For those who have already taken 483, 484 is definitely more manageable since you already have report writing experiences.