Applied Quantum Chemistry

Quantum chemistry stops being a chalkboard exercise here and becomes something you actually run: the course is about turning the Schrödinger equation into numbers you can trust for real molecules, and understanding which approximations got you there. You'll spend most of the semester on ORCA-based projects (five of them, alongside a midterm and final), working through Hartree-Fock, post-HF correlation methods, DFT, and eventually QM/MM, while learning to judge when a basis set or functional is actually appropriate. Building on your earlier physical and quantum chemistry, it's the senior course where computational results stop being magic and start being defensible, useful whether you're heading into materials, catalysis, or any graduate work that touches electronic structure.