Facilities and instrumentation:

We are rather instrument rich. There is only an infrequent line for the NMR and only if you choose not to be trained on both Bruker and Varian instruments. With 8 instruments ranging from 300 – 800 MHz, there’s no excuse to not have access to one or have a need for a higher field instrument. The only place (as far as I know) that has more and with any higher field is Wisconsin, and that’s a national lab. There are three X-ray diffractometers available for general use, which I believe is also a regional high, a kappa, a 3 circle and a powder. (There are something on the order of 7 diffractometers in the building, but most of them belong to specific groups.) The guy that runs the place, Bruce Noll, is something of a hard ass, but a generally excellent teacher. He was trained by the same guy at UK, who is also a reputed crystallographic master. Dunno much more than that. The mass spec facility is in the process of obtaining 3 new instruments after being awarded a rather huge NSF grant for the purchase of large instruments(?). The current new kid is a MALDI-TOF that has isotopic resolution all the way up to 4000 daltons and can give you low res up to 10,000 daltons. But I’m not a mass spec person, so I’ll only say that the two new instruments are supposed to be even better. Turn-around time is less than 24 hours in most cases, depending upon what you need done. The present workhorse is a 16 year old turd, so when it’s replaced, the place will obtain mini rockstar status next to UIUC. The department is also part of a new Imaging consortium funded with about 6 million bucks that will provide general access (in addition to the labs that already have them) confocal microscopy, animal imaging facilities, SEM, TEM, AFM, so on an so forth for pretty cheap user fees. We also have, as general access instrumentation, several Van de Graaff and a pretty tight linear accelerator in our DOE lab, which is next door. Indeed, I can’t think of a single instrument that isn’t available on this campus with the exception of a cyclotron, which is an hour away at Argonne.

The buildings these fine instruments are housed in are ugly, but their rather unattractive nature doesn’t appear to affect their function, so if “ugly” is the worst thing I can say about the place, it’s not doing too bad. In any regard, it’s something that paint could fix, should some administrator take notice that they do, indeed, work in a building where each floor is colored with a unique shade of vomit.

Faculty

The faculty are generally strong. Mobashery, Miller, Sevov, Castellino, Smith, Taylor and Wiest are all probably at the top of their game and produce some very interesting chemistry, even though I’m not overly qualified to comment on some of them. I suppose they’ve hired a new faculty member here every 3 years or so, thus it’s hard to say how many of them will turn out. I have no idea, honestly, how we rank in individual programs. I can clearly see that we are ranked abysmally in US News and World Report but the amount of peer reviewed grant money that we get is oddly in contrast to where we stand. It would leave me to assume that we are either unranked in the individual programs or ranked rather poorly. I have only this to say about the situation: I don’t really care. I don’t know what goes into the ranking, I don’t know how people arrive at their conclusions, but from all the available data, it appears as though ND is a very good department with no limitations and, as sad as it may be, these “rankings” serve only to worsen the quality of incoming students.

Location

South Bend is not the highlight of the midwest, but for $12 you can hop a train (that allows you to drink beer openly) to Chicago. Indianapolis is 2 hours south and the airport here is always good for getting you out. There is a bus that stops on campus that takes you directly to Chicago’s O’Hare, so transportation isn’t an issue. In the grand scheme of things, I’m in the lab 10 hours a day, so whatever awesome existence that exists outside (or doesn’t exist) I’d not know of it. I can eat pretty much whatever I want and there has been a recent profusion of high end Jazz clubs and the Fiddler’s Hearth is possibly one of the sweetest Irish Pubs I’ve ever been to. They serve Guinness for, like, $3 a pint because everything is cheap as hell out here. The little stipend they hand out is enough to live by yourself in a two bedroom apartment whilst eating out most nights because you’re too lazy to cook for yourself. A buck goes far in The Bend.

The whole “Catholic thing”

Here’s a section that’s probably not included in a lot of reviews, but it should be mentioned: The department is secular. This is because science is secular. This university understands that and respects that. The Catholic backdrop adds more kitsch to the place with its “touchdown jesus” and potentially trademarked phrase “Catholic Character” and the annual planting of the crosses for the unborn (and semiannual vandalism of said event by those rabble rousing libruls) then it adds any sense of Christian mores, but it does attract a lot of lectures on morality and ethics in science and, I think, if this place were smart, they would capitalize on that like Tuskegee did. Those lectures are actually very interesting and not available with such frequency and debate at most schools. So, Catholic kitsch and interesting lectures are the only observable outcome of Catholicism here. It’s a small price to pay. If you’re Catholic, of course, it’s gotta be like a Jesus themed Disneyland or something.