Upper-year technical electives

As you know, you will need to select five technical electives with chemistry content for your honours Chemistry or honours co-op Chemistry academic program plan. A significant fraction of the chemistry-labelled courses available for selection as technical electives with chemistry content have been designated by "Special Topics in..." labels, and have been assigned “4X0” numbers, in which the “4” tells you that the course is an upper-year course (i.e., a course that can most profitably be taken in your third or fourth years of study), the “X” indicates the subdiscipline of chemistry that is most closely associated with the course material, and the “0” tells you that it is a “Special Topics” course. For this set of courses, the middle digit, “X”, has the set of values 1 (inorganic/materials chemistry), 2 (analytical chemistry), 3 (biological chemistry/biochemistry), 4 (computational/theoretical chemistry), 5 (physical chemistry), 6 (organic chemistry), 7 (polymer chemistry), and 8 (medicinal chemistry). Each special topics course carries a course title and, for registration purposes, each course will be assigned a four-digit course identity number (identification number) once it has been scheduled by the Registrar's Office to be offered in a specified academic term.

Many of the Special Topics courses are offered either biennially (i.e., every second year) or only occasionally (when there is felt to be a need for a specific course). In addition, there are several other third and/or fourth year courses that are not always offered on an annual basis. Naturally, any course may be subject to cancellation should there be too few students interested in taking it during the term in which it has been scheduled to be offered: a general rule of thumb for such cancellations is that there should typically be at least 5 or 6 students who will take the course.

A number of courses that are offered annually by the Department of Chemistry, and listed below, also serve as technical electives with chemistry content. In addition, the following courses offered by other Waterloo academic departments may be chosen as technical electives with chemistry content: PHYS 359 (antirequisite: CHEM 450 Statistical Thermodynamics), BIOL 354, BIOL 439, CHE 36, EARTH 221, EARTH 421, EARTH 459, NE 333 (antirequisite: CHEM 370, Introduction to Polymer Science), NE 334 (antirequisite: CHEM 450, Statistical Thermodynamics), NE 335.

List of upper-year courses offered annually

* Note that CHEM 333 and CHEM 331 are antirequisites.

Because many special topics courses are not given on an annual basis, the Department of Chemistry is maintaining a terms of offering table below, in order to aid you in planning your course selections for years 3 and 4 of your academic program.

List of technical electives not offered on an annual basis

Note: the following course offerings are unofficial and subject to change.