Student Chapter Success: Looking Back and Looking Forward
2024 has been a busy, exciting, and productive year for ACS student chapters. We checked in with some of the Outstanding Chapter Awards winners about their accomplishments and the lessons they learned in hindsight.
From outreach to professional development, chapters organize phenomenal activities for peers and local communities. They both knowledge and enjoyment of chemistry while helping chapter members grow professionally. Get ideas for your next event below!
Belhaven University | Jackson, Mississippi
Favorite Events
Our most standout activities this past year were a science fest at the Mississippi Children’s Museum and reviving the Southeast Undergraduate Research Conference (SURC). For the Mississippi Science Fest, we joined forces with other STEM departments at our university to foster appreciation for STEM among underrepresented youth. The chapter conducted a 3D-printed-characters activity and gave a demonstration of chromatography using coffee filter paper flowers.
SURC was our chapter’s most ambitious undertaking. On hold since 2020, the conference was resurrected in 2024 in collaboration with Mississippi College and the ACS Mississippi Local Section. Our members served as volunteers in the planning process, providing feedback on logos, T-shirts, and web design to the organizing committee and helping at the event with registration, greeting and guiding attendees, and setting up posters. The conference's success not only underscored the dedication of faculty and students involved but also provided us with valuable insights into diverse skill sets essential for professional success beyond traditional research and academia.
Lessons Learned
Our efforts toward planning and executing SURC consumed much of our focus in the fall. Other campus activities, notably those celebrating National Chemistry Week (NCW), could have benefited from more comprehensive advertising. We need to have a plan for promoting NCW going forward that can carry over from year to year, and thus, from officers to officers. For example, mentioning NCW in the weekly events digest email, passing out flyers, and sending emails.
Plans for Next Year
We are excited about hosting new and improved events next year, including a much-anticipated "Desserts and Demos" community event, which we’ve been meticulously planning over the past months. We plan to invite current students, university employees with their families, and the nearby community to experience some flashy chemistry demonstrations to engage people in science and have a sweet treat on the side. We also look forward to expanding our network by engaging with student chapters at other colleges to exchange ideas and collaborate on projects.
North Central College | Naperville, Illinois
Favorite Events
Looking back over the year, we are most excited about our Chemical Concoction series and STEM Café series, which were conducted on campus for students. Our chapter held two Chemical Concoction events, one on Valentine’s Day focused on the chemistry of rock candy, and the other on the chemistry of boba (also known as bubble tea). At our STEM Café career event, we invited three faculty members with experience working in the chemical industry who discussed the types of fields students could pursue and safety regulations that exist within industry.
Lessons Learned
One thing we would have done differently is to make advanced preparations for a chemistry-themed escape room. We had the idea to use a space on campus to create an escape room, in which students would have to utilize their knowledge of chemistry, along with context clues, to escape in the fastest time possible in order to earn a prize. Doing this around Halloween would have been ideal, but we ran out of time to plan the event in time for the holiday. We realize that we should have taken some time earlier to check out various spaces and to come up with a theme for the event and ideas for a couple of different rooms.
Plans for Next Year
We are most excited about expanding our STEM Café series to bring in outside speakers in other fields of chemistry/STEM to speak on their career journeys. We want to help give students a better understanding of various career options available to them with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
Bethany College | Bethany, West Virginia
Favorite Events
One of our chapter’s biggest accomplishments was hosting a variety of activities for National Chemistry Week: an element symbol scavenger hunt, a science movie night, a STEM student picnic with chemistry-themed trivia, and an interactive slime-making activity for students to learn about polymers and their chemical properties.
Notable successes this spring were a bingo event organized in collaboration with the university’s Student Activities Council that nearly 100 students attended, a forensic chemistry blood typing exercise for the Math and Science Day Competition for local high school students, and our participation at ACS Spring 2024 in New Orleans, which was attended by six members who presented research projects.
Lessons Learned
It may have been beneficial to host events that had a greater focus on both recruitment and retention. We could have hosted more events that applied to the entire student body rather than students that major in chemistry or other STEM fields.
Plans for Next Year
The newly elected executive committee is planning to brainstorm ideas for new events that are educational, accessible, and interesting for the whole student body. We are also looking forward to hosting a variety of new events, growing the organization, having additional discussions about our passion for science, and more.
University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) | Birmingham, Alabama
Favorite Events
Since the pandemic, we have found it difficult to rebuild, recruit, and maintain membership in our chapter. To combat this, our chapter has devoted time to hosting at least one event every week of the academic year. We’re proud to say we’ve been able to host a variety of career development, outreach, and educational events while maintaining a close-knit community of chemistry-loving undergrads!
Our biggest highlights are: The Chemistry of Slime, Women in Chemistry Wheel of Fortune, The Chemistry of Beer with former UAB professor of chemistry Dr. Tracy Hamilton, Exploring Higher Education with a Current UAB Chemistry Graduate Student, How to Make Environmentally Friendly Laundry Detergent with UAB’s Green Initiative, and Mad Scientist Day. In addition to these exciting events, we volunteered at Birmingham’s McWane Science Center, where 20 members shared exciting demos with kids of all ages. This is a member favorite because of how excited the kids get about science! This spring, our chapter showcased chemistry to more than 200 UAB students by 30 volunteers who performed demos.
Lessons Learned
If we could do one thing differently, we would have taken more risks. Our organization played it safe by hosting events that we’ve done in the past because they are familiar to us, and we already know how to set them up and advertise them. The problem with playing it safe is that students who have been at UAB for years have already attended the events and have seen the demos before, and we believe this also contributes to our challenge with retaining existing members. In the future, we plan to host never-before-seen events and demonstrations.
Plans for Next Year
We’re looking forward to hosting more events on the scale of our Mad Scientist Day. Getting more than 200 people to attend an event greatly increases the visibility of chemistry across our university and encourages students to explore science outside of the classroom. Through the collaboration of officers, we hope to come up with more events that engage a huge audience of not just current organization members but the entire campus.
Heidelberg University | Tiffin, Ohio
Favorite Events
One of our most successful events this year was a luncheon talk with Heidelberg alumnus Caleb Frye, a PhD student at Duquesne University, who discussed his experiences in graduate school and presented information about his research. Members asked questions about what graduate school is like and sought advice. This was a great professional development opportunity for students to learn about future educational possibilities. We received many compliments on how beneficial the event was.
Lessons Learned
If we were to go back in time, we would like to implement more outreach events within our community. We would love to do more events like the outreach event at our local library where we made iridescent bookmarks with young students ages 6–10. As scientists, we need to share our love of chemistry with others and inspire the next generation. These outreach events are a perfect way for us to reach those goals. We would also like to hold more study sessions. Chemistry courses can be challenging, and we have members from all college levels who can help students early in their academic journey in need of tutoring.
Plans for Next Year
Next year, we are very excited about including more outreach opportunities in our schedule. As previously mentioned, our organization loves these events, and they are a great way to share our love of chemistry with others. We are especially looking forward to going to schools and sharing chemistry with young children. We have already recruited some education majors who have contacts at the schools we plan to visit.
We are also looking forward to hosting more events on campus that involve other majors besides chemistry. One thing our chapter prides itself on is having a wide range of educational backgrounds. This allows us to be a diverse organization that has different perspectives.
Eastern Oregon University | La Grande, Oregon
Favorite Events
Our chapter was successful in coordinating the “Investigators of Science” program (previously called “Girls in Science”), which offers STEM opportunities to young children in rural areas of the county. More than 60 students ages 6–10 traveled to our university for the day. The theme was “Zombie Apocalypse,” and the students utilized chemistry, biology, mathematics, and computer science to solve the mystery. This was a wonderful way for us to connect with the community and share our passion and knowledge with younger students.
Lessons Learned
Throughout the year, our chapter demonstrated remarkable productivity by spearheading a variety of engaging events at both elementary and high schools, while also dedicating substantial time to active involvement within our university and local community. Although the majority of these volunteer opportunities arose from community members reaching out to our chemistry club, retrospectively, the club could have generated more original ideas for volunteer initiatives. Moreover, our experiments and activities could have been themed around pertinent topics within our county, such as agriculture. More efforts could have also been put forward to collaborate with other clubs at the university.
Plans for Next Year
In the coming year, we are looking forward to providing many exciting new opportunities for activism within our community and recruiting new members to our club. Our chapter visits chemistry classrooms once a term as a recruiting effort to enlist new members, and we are looking forward to involving the next generation of STEM students in our chemistry pursuits.
