The Bowdoin Chemistry Baddies, named by founders Jasmine Decrem ’28 and Giovanni Grassi ’28, is as much a club as it is a mindset.
While Decrem and Grassi first started the group to help motivate them through Organic Chemistry last fall, it quickly evolved into a community of chemistry enthusiasts dedicated to fostering a love for the subject.
According to Charles Weston Pickard Professor of Chemistry Richard Broene, the group “just sort of appeared.” Grassi and Decrem pin the club’s inspiration to the first time chemistry slipped past the threshold into fun, when, in class, they devised a chemistry-themed song and dance to “Beauty and a Beat” by Justin Bieber and Nicki Minaj.
The pair then launched an Instagram account (@chembadddies), which features over sixty sparkly, bubbly, pop-culture-infused chem-themed posts filled with jokes, gags, wordplay, and funny skits.
The videos were a hit, with some garnering tens of thousands of views. However, the group extends beyond their online presence and into real life. Chem Baddies is a revamp of the Kamerling Society at Bowdoin, a past “social outreach group and a social group for chemistry students,” Grassi said. The society was founded in 1979 and named after Bowdoin chemistry professor Samuel Kamerling (1934-1969).
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One of the goals of the Kamerling Society was to strengthen ties between chemistry students and professors. To facilitate the reboot, the Chem Baddies set up weekly lunches.
Senior Lecturer in Chemistry Michael Danahy—who, along with Broene, makes a lot of appearances in the Chem Baddies Instagram posts, including of his cut-out head—says the weekly lunches with different chemistry faculty members have helped bond the department.
In addition to the lunches, the Chem Baddies host breakfasts, run themed activities, and play pranks on the department.
Broene inspired the pranks when he complained that students seemed to shy away from them. So the Chem Baddies decorated Druckenmiller Hall with pictures of faculty members’ faces, renamed the building in honor of Broene, and dreamed up new nameplates for the office doors of faculty, like Michael ”PhDiva” Danahy.
Before launching Chem Baddies, Decrem admitted she was "a bit scared to approach faculty. “They seemed so elusive and serious. And yet, when you get to know them, they are all hilarious—and people, too.”
Danahy echoes this observation from the faculty's point of view, saying that the Chem Baddies have allowed students to see that “these people who teach in the chemistry department, they’re real people. They are not just, you know, people who think about the periodic table all the time. They have interests, they have lives.”
As for the chemistry department as a whole, the moral of the story in the words of both Danahy and Broene is, “give us a shot.”
Danahy acknowledges that while people often view chemistry with "trepidation, because it involves both logic and math, and periodic tables, and all sorts of stuff that they may or may not have liked in high school,” it's actually accessible, fascinating, and applicable to many different areas.
Going forward, Decrem and Grassi say they will continue building their current program, including organizing more lunches, breakfasts, weekend activities—and pranks—for chemistry students and faculty.
Additionally, while not sharing too many details about their top-secret ideas, they said they are hatching big holiday plans.
Finally, in the words of Grassi, the ultimate goal of the Chem Baddies is “world domination”—so look out for that, too.
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