Honor the Mole with Chatham’s Chemistry Club

From left: Chemistry Club members Benjamin Brown ’26, Syba Ismail ‘25, Rachel Koshy ’26, and Madeline Bell ’26. (Mick Stinelli)

When the Chatham University’s Chemistry Club set up their table at this year’s Student Engagement Fair, some people wrote the club off as just another homework assignment.

“There’s a stigma,” said Chemistry Club Vice President Syba Ismail ’25. “When we were advertising this club in the beginning of the year, people would walk past our booth and be like, ‘I sucked at chemistry. Chemistry is hard.’”

It was the reaction Ismail expected. For some people, even the word chemistry brings back thoughts of memorizing the periodic table or figuring out complex math problems. But the club wanted to show that they’re accessible to students who aren’t as involved in the sciences.

That’s where the idea of recognizing Mole Day started.

Think of Mole Day like Pi Day, the holiday on March 14 honoring the irrational number π, which begins with the digits 3.14 and continues infinitely.

Mole Day, which is observed from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. on October 23, celebrates the mole, a unit of measurement used to find the amount of substance in matter. The date and time were chosen by a chemistry educator in the 1980s because of its similarity to the numbers found in Avogadro’s constant, a value used in solving questions of measuring matter.

Chemistry Club President Rachel Koshy ’26 first heard of Mole Day from a friend, whose high school teacher used the unofficial holiday to get students jazzed about chemistry. For the chem club, celebrating the day with arts and crafts seemed like a good way to bring people into the fold with a pun-filled idea.

At the Oct. 25 Mole Day craft contest, Chatham students will be able to use provided paper and other materials to build a mole, which should resemble the furry critters that crawl underground. The two best moles will earn each of their creators a gift card. Hopefully, students will meet new friends along the way, Koshy said.

“How do we make chemistry fun?” said Koshy, who is pursuing a degree in neuroscience. “How do we make it so that people want to engage with us on their free time? That’s not an easy task considering we’re very much an academics-based club. There’s no math involved in our mole event, thankfully.”

(Chatham Chemistry Club / Courtesy of Madeline Bell)

But for the members of the Chemistry Club, there’s plenty of fun in chemistry itself. Club Treasurer Benjamin Brown ’26, who majors in biochemistry, said the club gives him a chance to hear people talk about their passions. “It’s really cool, trying to understand these things that people are really passionate about and can go into detail about, that sense of wonder—being able to communicate that is really cool.”

Madeline Bell ’26, who is the club secretary, majors in cell and molecular biology. She said chemistry gives people a chance to understand the fundamental rules of the world that we take for granted, like finding out why water beads on a table.

“It’s a very basic thing,” she said. “But you learn all these little details about why these things happen when you’re in chemistry. Now you understand what’s happening with things you can’t see, and that explains the stuff you can see.”

Mick Stinelli is a Writer and Digital Content Specialist at Chatham University. His writing has previously appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 90.5 WESA.