The Minor Course Requirement in Organic Chemistry

All graduate students in the PhD program are required to complete the minor course requirement. Some general rules about the minor courses:

• 10 credits of coursework is required.
• Only courses with a grade of B or better can be counted for minor credit.
• No courses in the student's major area can be counted; i.e., Chem 547, 641, 647 and 841 cannot be counted for organic students, and 842, 843, and 845 courses closely related to the student's area cannot be counted (this means in almost all cases that 84x courses taught by a student's major professor cannot be counted).
• All approved courses in Biochemistry and Pharmacy may be counted for minor credit.
• Only two credits of Chemistry 636/637 (NMR instrumentation) may be counted for minor credit.
• Chemistry 607 (the safety course) may not be counted for minor credit.
• Both the major professor and the minor professor must approve the courses.
• The minor agreement form must be submitted before half of the courses are taken (i.e., during the fall or spring semester of the first year of graduate school).

There are two distinct ways of satisfying the minor requirement.

Option A - the Area Minor. The student identifies a scientific area (e.g., Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Biochemistry, Pharmacy, etc), and selects a minor professor in that area. The list of courses taken must be approved by the minor professor.

Option B - the Distributed Minor. This minor program consists of a selection of courses chosen from at least two divisions in the Chemistry Department (for the purposes of the minor courses, the Divisions within the Chemistry Department are treated as Departments). The minor professor is the Associate Chair of the Department. The pan-divisional courses Chem 603, 605 and 608 can be used for minor credit, but Chem 607 (Safety) cannot. Only two credits of the NMR Instrumentation sequence Chem 636/637 can be used for minor credit.