Organic chemistry lab at Penn State (main campus)

CHED 1808

Katherine M. Masters, kmasters@psu.edu, Department of Chemistry, Penn State University, 210 Whitmore Lab, University Park, PA 16802
The goal of the organic chemistry lab at Penn State's main campus is to have the students experience the workload of a typical synthetic organic chemist which includes synthesizing or isolating compounds and purifying these compounds that are studied via spectroscopic methods using various instruments. For a lab that has an enrollment of 1,000 students per year, the challenge to effectively serve this amount of students with the goal in mind is quite significant. We have successfully been able to give all students full access to all types of instrumentation. We have also seen a need to have students connect organic chemistry to their major field of study. We have recently started to assign experiments to each individual student based on their major. Reorganization of the many sections of this lab and implementation of discipline-focused experiments made this goal a reality.