Chemistry Career Day

CHEMISTRY CAREER DAY has been run in the department, in conjunction with the St. Louis Section of the American Chemical Society, from 1993 to the present. In 2016 Professors O'Brien and Stine were awarded a Salute to Excellence for doing this for 15 consecutive years, having replaced Professor Barton who had done it, for all but one year, since 1993.

In 2002, a new and highly successful format was introduced by O'Brien and Stine that was engaging and beneficial to the students. The event features:

A welcome from the Department Chair and from a representative from the Saint Louis Section of the American Chemical Society
An overview of career opportunities for chemists
A career advice talk and often a career retrospective presented by a guest speaker who is often a graduate of the UMSL Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
An overview of what it is like to study chemistry as a major
After these talks, students proceed in smaller groups guided by UMSL PhD students to visit faculty research labs in different areas of chemistry and central instrumentation facilities (X-ray diffraction, NMR, electron microscopy, mass spectrometry). Students spend about 10 minutes at each stop in this typically 90 minute or so tour and are shown by someone in the lab a direct visual representation and explanation of an interesting feature of the lab (e.g. laser spectroscopy, organic synthesis, fluorescence, computational chemistry, catalysis)
After their tour is complete, students reassemble and the UMSL Chemistry Club together with the faculty advisor presents a 20 minute chemical magic show that is visually engaging and informative
Finally, the students are provided with a pizza lunch before they must go to their buses and depart.