This study investigated undergraduate chemistry students' career aspirations and how these vary from one educational system to another in different geographic regions. The participants of this study were undergraduate chemistry students from various institutions located in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The study took place in the form of an international cross-sectional survey. Findings of this study show that undergraduate students choose to study chemistry predominantly because they are interested in it or because they like it. This study also found that, whereas undergraduate students mainly have plans of pursuing a career that uses chemistry, they seem to be aware that a chemistry course can lead to many career options and as such only a few have chosen to study it as a route to a specific career. The findings of this study may be important in informing policies to attract and retain students in chemistry courses.

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Reversible-Deactivation Radical Polymerisation (RDRP) is one of the most exciting developments in chemistry over the past few decades, but it is rarely mentioned when polymerisation mechanisms are introduced in the final years of secondary education or first years of tertiary education. We propose that this is unfortunate, as RDRP is simpler than conventional Radical Polymerisation both conceptually and in terms of setting quantitative problems, and that it illustrates several other important features of chemistry as a human endeavour: How essential mechanistic unities are hidden by the details of how we write a chemical reaction, how a ‘bug’ in one stage of development of a process can become a ‘feature’ in a later stage, and how exciting changes can occur quite suddenly in fields thought to be mature and uninteresting.

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