拉曼大学化学系介绍 - 英文版(Chemistry Course Year 3 Subjects (May intake)) 对化学系和化学工程系有混淆的同学可以看看！

This will be the last post on the introduction of the chemistry course in UTAR for the third years study.

Year 3 Trimester 1
1 Industrial Organic and Natural Products Chemistry
2 Polymer Chemistry
3 Advanced Coordination Chemistry
4 Project

The first subject consists of two part while the first part is basically about how the organic compound been synthesized in industry scale and the following part is about how the natural products been formed by the plants, animal and included their mechanism. If you feel interesting on organics and their conversion of organic compound from one to another, you will find this part very interesting. They give you a starting material and required you to give the reaction and process to synthesize a compound. You can use your imagination to synthesize the organic compound without care about the cost and yield, you can synthesize a simple compound by going a big circle, too. In the first part of this subject, industrial organics, we first start on coal, C and synthesis gas, CO to make organic compounds, then convert those C1 unit organics into acetylene and alkene, alkane, olefin and aromatics, then alcohol, carboxylic acid, polyamide, benzene and their derivation. You can’t imagine that you really need to swallow the whole lecturer note in order to apply your imagination to synthesize the organic compound. For the natural product, if you studied biology in STPM, then you will feel easy on those weird names and if you hate to draw mechanism, then this second part will definitely kill you. In this part, we learnt on primary and secondary metabolites, terpenes, fatty acid, polyketides, steroid, alkaloids, shikimic acid, peptide and protein analysis. This natural products do train my logical thinking and you will feel satisfied when you draw out the mechanism completely to form the desired compound. :D

Subject 2 taught on type of polymer, their respective monomers with IUPAC nomenclature, and polymerization mechanism and their physical state. In their physical state, few terms were introduced which were crystalline and amorphous state of polymer and their thermal transitions. Crystalline and amorphous state is the morphology in solid state, in short, is how they arrange themselves when they are in solid state. This state will affect the physical properties such as tensile strength. The thermal transition is the temperature that the phase of the polymer can be changed from amorphous to crystalline or vice verse. Next, for the type of polymerization mechanism, there have step polymerization, radical polymerization, emulsion polymerization, emulsion polymerization, chain copolymerization, ionic chain polymerization, ring-openning polymerization, but we will only focus on specified polymerization process. This subject also touch on stereochemistry for polymer and the rate of polymerization which is very similar with what had studies in kinetics subject (Y2S3 subject)

Subject 3 is a more advanced subject that after the transition element subject (Y2S1 subject). We study on the type of ligands (pie-donor ligand, sigma donor ligand, pie acceptor lignad), the reaction that can occur from the ligand itself, between the ligand and ligand and also between the metal and the ligand. 18 electron rule was used to calculate the electron that allocate around the transition metals. Those syllabuses were just to let us be ready on the catalytic reaction of different process. Remember hydrogenation of alkene to produce alkane? This reaction seems simple but in fact it involved several reactions. Some goes to other reaction that we never heard before. .

Project, we also known it as final year project (FYP). In fact, I do enjoy to do my fyp since it is different with the formal lecture class and this make this fyp so attractive to me. We no longer required to stay in the lecture hall and tutorial class to wait the class end, instead, we gain the power to handle our own project partially. Our supervisor will provide the chemical and apparatus and even method for you but you need to manage the time to handle them by practicing to feel familiar with the testing methods, the calculation part, handle instruments and interpret the data. Basically we select our project based on three main criteria which is based on the title you felt interesting, based on the instruments that you intend to learn, and based on the popularity of the lecturer. For me, I have consider those three factor and finally I chose the supervisor I liked, the title I felt interested and the instrument that I intend to learn on it. That the reasons that make me be so passive on doing my fyp without any resistance. The general structure of fyp is firstly we have to write a proposal on how to do that experiment with the selected method and doing literature review to support your point of view then you have to let your supervisor to approve, after that we have to conduct out experiment and investigate on the exact method to conduct your experiment by doing some correction on the procedures. Then we have to make a presentation to other coordinator on what we are doing in our fyp and there will have a Q&A section on your fyp and here is the challenging parts. After completion of fyp, we need to do a presentation on our result and finding to discuss our results. We also know this presentation as VIVA (pronounced as waiwa…) but the reason why….? I also dono. LOL.  For the schedule of my fyp, I also introduced in this post but sadly it is in Chinese version.

Year 3 Trimester 2
1 Organizational Behaviour
2 Public Speaking and Oral Presentation

Subject 1 is quite similar to the scope that I learnt during my foundation, management studies. This subject start with introducing the field of organizational behavior, move on to individual behavior personality and values, followed with perception and learning in organizations, then workplace emotions, attitude and stress, employee motivation, decision making and creativity, team dynamics, communication in teams and organization, power and influence in workplace, leadership, organization structure, organization culture and organization change. Those term are so strange for me as a science students, but now I realize that it is really useful when I really work in a company, an organization. This subject is with a simple structure that we just need to do a group assignment, then go for the final exam, without any presentation. Unlike the subject of moral and pengajian Malaysia that have many assignment to do and a lot of presentation needed. Since this subject does not related much with chemistry, so I don spend my time here.

For the next subject, a big contrast with the previous subject that this subject only got presentation and their presentation is very challenging. This subject teaches us how to be a presenter and besides giving theory on that, we practice for it by giving presentation. The lecture is funny since the lecturer always tell us story during his lecture (which some is relevant while mostly are not. XD ) The first presentation is an individual speech that we need to select a topic and give a informative speech for about 10 minutes and the topic needed to be approved by the lecturer. Can you imagine that a lecturer that listened to many individual speeches and what topic leave for him that he really din heard before? Oh gosh!! The second presentation is more challenging that we need to give a persuasive speech for about 15 minutes. Fortunately, due to constrain of time, we had a two people group presentation that shorten the duration of presentation. Thanks to the holiday and short trimester. :DD So this also another interesting subject that I joined in my degree studies. Why we have to restrict ourselves to develop in a small group of information such as chemistry? Explore ourselves, the world outside is also very huge. Enjoy those different around us. ^^

Year 3 Trimester 3
1 Food Chemistry
2 Spectroscopy and Chromatography II
3 Environmental Science and Technology II

Subject 1 brief about the type of water present in food, effect of water toward spoilage of food, method of preservation, type of compound (carbohydrate, protein, lipids, vitamin, mineral, and food additives.) and their function and application in food. Carbohydrate chapters involved monosaccharide, disaccharide, starch, cellulose, the method to modify starch for more application. (gelantization, pasting, cross-linking, depolymerization). Protein discuss about their structure from primary to quaternary structure, denaturation, pI value, solubility, interfacial properties, and the type of processing method that will change the structure of protein. Lipid explain the nomenclature, source of lipid, structure of lipid, melting curve of lipid, method to modify lipid and the way that the lipid spoil and get rancid.

Subject 2 provided addition information on the type of other instrument used in spectroscopy and chromatography. It covered on GC-MS, HPLC, 13C NMR, Raman Spectroscopy, Fluorescence and Phosphorescence, Ion chromatography and couple technique and quality control. We studied about the theory, instrument or the compartment of instrument, operation of instrument, method to analyses the result. You just can’t believe that how thick is the theory part and the compartment part that mainly 70% of the lecture note and those notes were thick as dictionary. I AM NOT KIDING, IT’S TURTH! Mass spectrum (MS) is another detector to determine the structure of the organic compounds and Gas Chromatography is a separation method to detect the presence of the organic compound and it is mainly for volatile compound while high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is for compound that less volatile compound and ion chromatography is a type of HPLC that involved for ionic compounds. 13C NMR is another NMR technique to determine the structure of the organic compounds. Raman spectroscopy was another spectroscopy that they scattered the light source and give rise to specify spectrum while fluorescence and phosphorescence is another absorption technique (the other example is FTIR) that determine the presence of compounds.

The last subject as listed in Y3S3 subject list is more on the waste water treatment, wetland and aquatic treatment, solid waste management and also hazardous waste management. We study on the constituent that present in the waste water and the method to detect them and remove them. Then we apply the method to remove the constituent in the waste water to the waste water treatment plant by understand how a waste water treatment plant operation. Wetland and aquatic treatment is another type of waste water treatment that possess with advantages, so we learn on the type of wetland and aquatic treatment system on how they been constructed and how they purified the waste water. Rubbish generated daily is consider as the solid waste so we also go through the method to mange those solid waste. Some minor syllabus also included chemical safety and risk assessment and green technology. In this part, we learn on the label on the chemical bottle that telling the hazardous extent (flammable, health, reactivity, radioactive) and also Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) that what information is provided that.  Next, green technology is introducing the idea of applying green technology and green engineering that design the product for the environment, for recycling, and to reduce waste and pollution.