Science Open House 2016
May 15, 2016
Toh Yi Jun
The NUS Faculty of Science (FOS) Open House 2016 was catered to incoming freshmen for the academic year of 2016/17. The event featured the various departments within FOS, minor and special programmes, as well as clubs and societies. Talks and laboratory tours were the highlight of the show, drawing hundreds of students.
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For the Open House, we specially synthesised sodium chloride and cupric sulfate crystals as free gifts for those who visited our booth. Synthesis was carried out over a period of 10 days, at the end of which we obtained cubic NaCl and parallelogramic CuSO4 crystals. The crystals were then purified and packaged into small ziplock bags for convenient storage and viewing. The crystals were well-received and we managed to give away almost half of our stock.
"It was important to help promote Chemistry, as the number of freshmen intending to study the subject this August seems to be rather low."
- Max Tan, President of EXCO AY15/16, on this year's freshmen intake
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NUS ACSSC also assisted with the Chemistry laboratory tours, where we helped out as tour guides and brought them to the various designated labs. We first went to the General Teaching Lab, where the students were shown a demonstration of column chromatography. Next up was the Synthesis Lab, where they were exposed to various analytical techniques such as NMR, Finally, we arrived at the Research Lab, where a graduate student spoke to them about her research project and introduced certain imaging instruments. Throughout the tour, NUS ACSSC members interacted with the students, answered their queries and shared with them some of our experiences. We hoped our efforts managed to make a difference and more students will opt to study Chemistry this year.
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For more information about NUS Chemistry, you may visit http://www.chemistry.nus.edu.sg.