Emma Aitken

Emma Aitken graduated from Vic in 2013 with a PhD in Chemistry. Emma worked with Dr Rob Keyzers and his Natural Products Chemistry group. 

Recently I found a chronicle of my life, the final homework task of primary school. For the closing sentence I had written, ‘I have one goal in life and that is to become an accountant. I think I can achieve this if I work hard and make sensible decisions’.

More than 10 years later, my first thought upon reading those words was, ‘that’s so unimaginative!’ Setting that aside, by all accounts I have failed in the first statement - during my first year at Victoria I realised that I couldn't ignore my curiosity to learn about what goes on at the atomic level. I changed the Science major of my conjoint BSc/BCA from Biotechnology to Chemistry and, although I also completed a Finance major, continued with post-graduate studies in Chemistry.

First year Chemistry is a prerequisite for many other courses, so classes and tutorials will be full of people with different ideas and objectives. This is a fantastic opportunity to meet as many people as you can and discuss what direction you want to take your Chemistry.

If you've been scarred by a bad high school experience and are only taking the course because you have to, undo this terrible wrong! Once you look beyond the intimidating jargon, Chemistry is really just identifying patterns and solving problems.

It’s the perfect subject for group study sessions because it’s inevitable that people have different strengths in different areas. If you think you've nailed a concept, test your own understanding and see if you can explain it to someone else.

Sometimes it’s necessary to isolate yourself with a textbook for a few hours and wrap your head around a complex issue - and it’s really satisfying when everything finally makes sense, even if you know it would have been much faster to just ask someone.

In addition to lectures and tutorials, all Chemistry papers in first year have a laboratory component which is organised to run alongside and reinforce the lecture content.

Come prepared to these, if you read through the experiment beforehand you’ll take a lot more away from each session because you can focus on mastering the practical skills. Talk to your post-grad demonstrators, they are always friendly and have excellent advice. You are also lucky to be taking CHEM115, a paper that introduces you to some important instrumental techniques used in research, such as infra-red, ultra-violet and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectronomy.

Most of this paper’s contents were part of second year when I was an undergrad student and it will be very advantageous to be introduced to these techniques early.

It’s hard for high school teachers to convey how interesting Chemistry is and where it can take you because leading science evolves so fast, it’s hard to keep up! Your future career may not even exist yet.

But if you think about how Chemistry affects pretty much everything in the modern world, you start to scratch the surface. Modern medicine, the quality and availability of the food you eat, the materials in your smart phone, your Gortex rain jacket.… Did you know that Sony has just released a TV with a screen made up of quantum dots? That’s incredible!

I think the most important message I can communicate is that Chemistry is like learning a language. At first it feels like you are just rote-learning information. But once you speak the language, you can be creative and have fun.

Remember that 100-level papers are designed to build the foundations of your knowledge, so if you’re not feeling challenged don’t be afraid to extend yourself. Be a nerd – read the ‘interest’ sections of the textbooks!!! And, most importantly, keep in mind that the real fun begins in second year.