honors chemistry is not for the weak

This quarter, I took Honors General Chemistry. Never before have I become so intimately familiar with the phrase "being thrown in the deep end."

The first day of class, we immediately jumped into learning quantum mechanics. No syllabus day, no introduction, just slides and slides of wavefunction equations. Our first quiz was so difficult that nearly everyone failed it. (In my professor's defense, he realized afterwards that he made the quiz too hard and didn't give enough time, and he apologized profusely). To top it all off, for a reason that is still beyond me, we were taught Python and expected to do all of our assignments in code! I was lucky, because I had taken AP Computer Science in my senior year of high school, so although Python was a new programming language, I was familiar enough with coding as a whole. Many of my other peers weren't as fortunate, however, and they struggled to learn programming with no prior knowledge whilst also learning chemistry at the same time.

Honors Gen Chem was definitely very fun and interesting. I love chemistry, and I really enjoyed learning all of the topics we did. But I truly came to understand that Honors was on an entirely different level from regular Gen Chem, and they expected a much higher caliber of work and effort from you.