On Tuesday night, eight teams of four, along with a number of spectators, converged in the Bridge atrium to compete at the annual Vassar Chemistry Bowl, held in conjunction with the American Chemical Society’s National Chemistry Week. Three teams were composed of Vassar students from a number of departments: Biochemistry, psychology, chemistry and biology majors all competed, in addition to five teams from other local schools. Team names were punny, including “Isomer? I Hardly Know Her” from Vassar and the “Holy Molars” from SUNY New Paltz.
Professor of Chemistry Christopher Smart brought a rusty metal box full of hand-written questions, of which the difficulty varied wildly. Students were asked questions about the namesakes of elements like hafnium, ruthenium and lutetium, quizzed on the states of matter of different metal coordination complexes and even asked to name the cause of death of Marie Curie’s husband. Though a student buzzed in to answer that he suffered from cancer caused by radiation poisoning like his wife and daughter, the audience soon found out that he was actually killed after being run over by a horse-drawn wagon.
The tournament was played in three rounds of 10 minutes each, alternating between buzz-in “tossup questions” and team-directed “bonus questions.” While a number of questions were multiple choice or true-false, some questions were much more difficult and required students to name chemical compounds or chemists like Glenn Seaborg and Enrico Fermi. Two Vassar teams advanced to the semifinals, one of which played in the finals before losing narrowly to the ‘Quantum Thoughts’ from SUNY New Paltz.
For a chemist, no event is complete without a handful of swag to take home. All participants were given stickers and pens with the Thermo Fisher Scientific logo, which is a slightly more exciting gift to receive than you might expect. Teams in the semifinals received foam Albert Einstein stress balls—even though Einstein was a physicist, not a chemist. He now sits proudly on my coffee table in a white lab coat and little red spectacles, unaware of the fact that the real Albert Einstein did not wear glasses. Teams in the semifinals received drawstring backpacks, and every member of the winning Quantum Thoughts was given a beaker with a mug handle, to be sure an object of envy of any chemistry student.
The chemistry department at Vassar exists in a strange kind of middle space. Dozens of students pass through its general chemistry course every semester in order to fill prerequisites for courses in other departments, and most never come back to take a second course. A similar phenomenon occurs with organic chemistry, a requirement for students on pre-med tracks. Enrollment in upper-level chemistry courses is low, with a number of classes having only four to eight students this fall semester, and the number of majors in any given class year is typically in the single digits. It was heartening to see the department come together and to see a group of students interested enough in chemistry to come to an event that was not widely advertised outside of a handful of flyers posted along the Bridge corridor.