A Preuniversity Initiative to Motivate Students to Pursue Chemistry Higher Education

Abstract

Molecular School (MS) is an extracurricular initiative intended to show relevant and complex concepts of chemical sciences to precollege students. The main goal is to motivate the participants to expand their awareness of chemical sciences and to acknowledge its relevance in everyday life, in order to stimulate the students to engage in chemistry undergraduate degrees. Here, we address the successful case of MS, implemented in Portugal, where recently, the universities have been facing significant difficulties in attracting new students to join chemistry-related courses. We report the first three editions of this free of cost preuniversity school, whose main subject is chemistry. All editions were held in the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and organized by PhD students of the department of chemistry of this institution. The three editions are discussed here, with particular focus on the last edition. Several participants ultimately chose chemistry BSc degrees to continue their education, which substantiates the positive outreach of this initiative. We believe MS can be replicated, adapted, and improved in other contexts and countries to increase the number of students enrolling chemistry university degrees.