This five-year MChem Chemistry with Placement degree is career-focused and has specialist pathways in pharmaceutical chemistry, computational chemistry, biology or materials and nanoscience. This offers the flexibility to decide which degree and pathway best suits your career ambitions.

During the undergraduate degree, youll learn from a comprehensive curriculum of chemistry fundamentals, exploring topics in chemical reactivity, atomic and molecular structure and chemical bonding, chemical thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, organic chemistry, multinuclear NMR spectroscopy, organic reactions, and chemical kinetics. You will gain a broad and balanced foundation of chemical knowledge and practical skills and apply this to create solutions for theoretical and practical problems in chemistry. Throughout the studies, you will choose optional courses which best align with your chemical interests, before choosing your specialist pathway in your fourth year.

As part of MChem Chemistry with Placement, you can choose an industrial placement to develop your skills and get to know an industrial chemical company. You will benefit from the staff training and assessment courses of the company, and gain wide experience of the industrial sector.

Your learning will include extensive laboratory work, to provide you with hands-on experience and opportunities to link theoretical knowledge from lectures to the real world. You will develop your practical abilities, confidence, and communication skills in addition to your extensive, cutting-edge theoretical knowledge of chemistry to become highly employable upon graduation. Chemistry graduates from Heriot-Watt University have a good reputation with employers who appreciate this unique combination of skills and knowledge. This will allow you to work in several roles across a diversity of fields within the pharmaceutical, biomedical, biochemical, health care, agriculture, food, drink and water industries. Opportunities also exist in the chemical, petroleum, electronic, aerospace and communications industries.

In addition to career pathways that directly use your practical skills and chemical knowledge, you can apply your problem-solving abilities, numeracy and other transferable graduate skills to various management roles beyond the chemistry industry. The broad range of skills involved in a chemistry degree means chemistry graduates are in high demand in other employment sectors, ranging from environmental protection to education, and commerce.