Studying honours gives you the chance to develop your research and professional skills in a specialised area. It represents the highest level of training in an undergraduate degree within the Australian tertiary education system. Honours is an extra year of study that combines aspects of undergraduate study with those of postgraduate research.
Honours introduces advanced research training through the completion of a thesis or a creative or practice-based research project. Throughout your study, you’ll be guided by staff who are passionate about research and the development of new researchers. An honours year provides the satisfaction of advanced study, a close supervision relationship with an academic, the ability to engage in specialised research and enhanced job opportunities upon graduation.
You can undertake research in chemistry in many different fields. Usually you will either synthesise or discover something previously unknown through the process of making independent decisions in your project.
Prerequisites
Three years of Advanced Science (Chemistry or Medical Chemistry programs) or Science (Major in Chemistry with a credit average, >65, and 18 UOC level III chemistry courses). Admission to Honours typically requires confirmation from the Honours coordinator or the Head of School.
What activities will you do while being involved in research?
- Analysis of scientific papers.
- Presentations of your research and the research of others.
- Development of a hypothesis.
- Running complex experiments that evaluate if a hypothesis is correct.
- Analysis of sometimes ambiguous data.
- Determine the next step and a new hypothesis.
What do you learn from doing research?
- Tenacity.
- Think critically about complex problems.
- Independence.
- Analyse multifaceted situations.
- Overcome fear of difficult situations.
- Become comfortable learning new concepts.
- Develop logical solutions.
- Work as a team solving challenging problems.
Contact
The Honours year
You can start in any term.
UNSW
Honours information
Handbook entries
Medicinal Chemistry Honours
The School of Chemistry also administers the Medicinal Chemistry Honours program and the research booklet is the same, as is the enrolment with the exception of Chem4503 (Medicinal Chemistry coursework) instead of Chem4502 (Chemistry coursework).