4 Chem 346 - General Course Information Chemistry 346 is a laboratory course consisting of modern synthetic experimental projects, interactive lectures concerning reaction mechanisms, experimental techniques, scientific writing and ethics, and instruction in using the chemical literature and chemical information resources. It is a practical course in which we hope will assist you in making the transition between an undergraduate laboratory course to a true laboratory research environment. Experiments. One goal of the course is to increase your proficiency and independence in performing the basic laboratory operations required for you to synthesize, separate, purify, and identify organic compounds. You will perform three projects involving state-of-the-art multistep organic syntheses, working in teams of two to three students on each project. Each student in the team will be required to prepare his or her own lab report for each project. Products and lab reports should be turned in on or before due dates. Care in performing an experiment is essential, and deadlines have been set to account for this factor. Accurate and efficient work will yield the best results. Inevitably, you will occasionally encounter difficulties in performing the experiments. It is important that the causes of the difficulties be determined, if possible, so that any errors can be corrected. You will be able to learn by the “hypothesis and test” procedure only if you understand what you are doing and are sufficiently involved intellectually as well as manually in the experiments. If the difficulties are judged by the instructors to have been beyond your control (e.g., contaminated reagents, defective equipment, faulty instructions or advice), you will, of course, not be penalized for new starting material. On the other hand, if the difficulties were under your control (e.g., failure to read the experiment thoroughly, lack of thought about the consequences of action taken, sloppy experimental technique), a penalty may be assessed for new starting material. Preparation. Your success and rate of progress in the laboratory will depend to a large degree upon your understanding of the experimental procedure (more desirably, the chemical logic that governs the procedure), which, in turn, depends on your care in preparing for the laboratory. Before each laboratory session, you should read the relevant material and try to understand the basic chemistry content, become familiar with the instructions, and understand the purpose of each step. Any questions concerning the experimental procedure should be raised with the instructor or your TA. Experiments will be performed only in your assigned laboratory section. You will not be allowed to work in any laboratory period other than your regularly assigned section unless you have advance permission from your TA and the agreement of the TA supervising your extra laboratory work.5 Special Projects (for the 2-credit option). Some students will have the opportunity to perform a special project in the research laboratories of chemistry department faculty members. Other students will be assigned special projects to be carried out in the Chem 346 laboratory. All students will present their independent research project at a poster session to be held during the last week of the course. Further details of the special project assignments and the poster session will be provided later in the semester. Laboratory Notebooks. You are required to use a notebook with duplicate numbered pages (one white and one yellow). The yellow pages are perforated for easy removal and photocopying as necessary. The TAs and the instructor will periodically review your lab notebook for content and format throughout the course. Please refer to the “Laboratory Notebook” section of this manual for detailed instructions on laboratory notebook organization. Samples. In most of the experiments, a chemical compound is synthesized and purified. This product will be submitted to the TAs in a clean, dry, properly labeled vial. Vials may be obtained from the stockroom. Do not turn in your samples in bottles or flasks. The label should include the your name, date, name of compound, purity (melting point or boiling point), quantity (grams), and yield. The purity, appearance, and amount of the compound will serve to indicate to the instructor the skill of the student in the laboratory techniques. Solid products should be in the form of crystals (as opposed to powders) and be clean and dry, as well as displaying the expected color and order (or lack of thereof) of the product. Liquid products should be clear (as opposed to turbid) oils displaying appropriate colors. Chemical Information Resources. Our departmental chemistry librarian, Emily Wixson, will present two lectures at the beginning of the course concerning the efficient use of information resources in the Chemistry library. She will introduce you to chemical drawing software (ISISDraw and ChemDraw), chemical database searching, including Chemical Abstracts (Scifinder), Beilstein Crossfire, MSDS, and Science Citation Index, and reference management software (RefWorks). You will be asked to provide “Supporting Information” for each of your three lab reports that can be found or prepared using these tools. Please refer to the “Library Resources: Supporting Information” section of this manual for further details. For those of you taking the course for the 2-credit option, you will be required to prepare an extended abstract that details the results of your independent research project. This abstract will be prepared using all of the chemical information resources you were introduced to throughout the semester. Handouts will provide additional information on this