This Is Chemistry at Keele

Chemistry at Keele University is unique because we have amazing, teaching facilities. So we have a fairly new lab. We get to use it from year one, and we also get to use NMR, UV Vis machine, IR machine from year one as well, which is a very good opportunity for us.

Chemistry is a very fundamentally practical subject. Employers expect Chemistry graduates to have hands-on experience with a lot of different instrumentation, a lot of different practical techniques. So the way that we set up our practical teaching is that every single student who comes through our doors leaves with a hands-on understanding of, not just how to interpret data from these techniques which you can get from a book, but practical understanding of, here's how I load my samples, here's how I troubleshoot difficult data, here's how I apply my practical skills to the real problems they'll face in the world.

The student community at Keele is very open, very friendly. We have many group projects together throughout the whole year, so it’s easy to make friends.

We pride ourselves here at Keele on the support that we offer our students. So not just in terms of pastoral support, but also support in getting them ready for the job market when they graduate. So we have a dedicated careers tutor the whole way through the degree, we have CV writing workshops with specifically CV writing for the chemical sciences. We have contacts in the local chemical industries who will come in and do mock interviews with our students.

Some of the other things that we really like to focus on at Keele is innovative teaching approaches. We do small group workshops, we do problem sessions, we do team-based learning, obviously with a lot of practical components, and we put a lot of focus on the independent research projects.

We have a wide range of modules from physical, inorganic or organic as well. They cover a whole range of topics for us. And in our final year, if we want to decide what we want to specifically go into, we can choose what we prefer and just focus on that.

What is interesting and unique about the course at Keele is we have sustainability and environmental chemistry very much as a strong theme throughout the degree. So we have dedicated modules specifically to those areas, but we also have them embedded in our more classical module types as well. Sustainability is a massive career area for the future, so our students having experience of that in their degree really gives them good skills for the future.