Chemistry as a choice

Dear readers,
I am a 2nd year chemistry student in a university. To those who are interested in taking Chemistry as your major course in university, here is what I would like to say to you;

1. It is a fun yet challenging course

    I wished there was someone who told me all about chemistry when I was a high school student. I was not good at Chemistry and was frequently scoring B's and C's for my exams. I didn't enjoy the subject as I felt it was too tough and difficult to understand. Once I started my pre-university education, I wanted to stay away from that subject. Since I took A Levels and was under Science stream so it was difficult to stray away from Chemistry. As I slowly learnt in my college, I found out that it was my lecturer who instigated the spark of interest in me. I soon learnt that Chemistry isn't all bad, in fact, it gave me excitement whenever I think of experiments. Chemistry experiments are the best.

    In school, our teachers was teaching us in English, a recent change in the education system, and they weren't proficient with that language yet. You could choose to blame the teachers but it was forced on them. I couldn't understand basic chemistry because they weren't able to help us understand the subject as in the first place they can't understand what they read. Its like when you are so used to using your right hand to write and suddenly, the government is forcing you to use your left hand to write.

  I wished all students who have problem with chemistry seek out help. In Malaysia, we are so used to tuition system. Its fine but somehow it became compulsory to parents who can afford it. The education system alone is not perfect and we are light years away from systems like in US or UK. It is not the syllabus I'm talking about but the nurturing of a student's mind. My younger sister started her pre-university education in an international school right here in Malaysia and I can see a vast difference in terms of learning and thinking skills. Malaysian student became parrots and it is not our fault we are like that.
 
  Chemistry is all about thinking in and out of the box. Don't constrain yourself to just textbooks (in our case, revision books). They are there as stepping stone. There is more to it than mere facts. It saddens me that Malaysian students who can be brilliant, choose to stay as parrots and compete who gets the most score in exams, when they can group together and ponder the best ways to answer or even question the question.

I shall write more about the criteria of becoming an awesome Chemistry student in my next post
Cheers