The career-focused degree 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, you’ll 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.

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.

English Language Requirements

If your first language is not English, we'll need to see evidence of your English language ability.

The minimum English language requirement for entry to this programme is IELTS 6.0 (or equivalent) with no score lower than 5.5.

If you do not have IELTS 6.0, we offer a range of English language courses to help you meet the English language requirement for this programme prior to commencing your studies.

Please see our detailed English language requirements.