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Anyone who got an A (or A- i suppose) who wants to share their secrets would be most appreciated.
Anyone who got an A (or A- i suppose) who wants to share their secrets would be most appreciated.
I took O-Chem I and II over the summer. It was much easier to focus exclusively on those courses despite the more accelerated pace.
My advice to you is exactly as everyone else said: don't try to straight-up memorize individual reactions. O-Chem is more like a language than anything else, so start out strong, know your functional groups like the back of your hand, and learn their properties as acids/bases or nucleophiles/electrophiles.
It also helps to do all of the practice problems in your textbook(s). Look for additional ones online if necessary.
Anyone who got an A (or A- i suppose) who wants to share their secrets would be most appreciated.
Forget about the A. Focus on perceiving ochem/orgo and practice. Set a rock-solid foundation in the first half, and you're good to go for the second half. Guaranteed.Anyone who got an A (or A- i suppose) who wants to share their secrets would be most appreciated.
Anyone who got an A (or A- i suppose) who wants to share their secrets would be most appreciated.
I've noticed that one of the biggest reasons people suck at organic chemistry because they suck at mechanisms. I've tutored it for a year and my students all had one thing in common: they would make the simplest mistakes in mechanisms. Drawing arrows the wrong way, wrong things attacking, bad resonance structures, etc. You need to practice arrow drawing until it becomes trivial and you can recognize overarching patterns, e.g. an acyl substitution always follows these same arrows over and over again, a Sn2 is these two arrows always and forever. Since mechanisms are the very fundamental of every reaction you 'memorize,' it can lead to failure if you lack that knowledge. Midterms usually have an even mix of mechanisms and broader synthesis problems; mastering mechanisms puts you a step ahead when studying for long synthetic schemes because along the way, you'll have mastered the nitty-gritty details.
Eventually it all comes down to just two things, really: Sterics and Electronics. These two concepts cover everything in organic chem.
Or as my professor put it "guys, I dont understand why organic chemistry is so hard for you to understand.
Its very simple, a negative charge and a positive charge come together. Thats it."
I definitely agree that a lot of this is mind-based. You think it ought to be really hard and so it is. I think the trick is similar to the MCAT - lots of practice.
Again, just like the MCAT, it isn't enough to practice, you have to really learn from your mistakes. For Orgo, that means that you need to get into the mindset that if you don't get a problem 100% right, you need to do it (or another similar one) over until you do. It's not good enough to look at the solutions and say, oh yeah, I see what I did wrong. Or say, okay, I get it, I'll do that next time. Before every test do lots and lots of problems. If you do 4/5 problems of a single type correctly then you don't fully understand the concept - if you did you would get them all right - and should go back to the reading or to your notes.
The trouble with Orgo is that a lot of the time you can get something right by chance - I think more often than in other subjects. Worse, you get two things wrong along the way and end up with the right answer. This is why it's dangerous to expect anything less than 100% correct in homework problems by the time you consider a topic 'learned'.
Organic Chemistry as a 2nd Language, FTW!
Organic Chemistry as a 2nd Language, FTW!
Organic Chemistry as a 2nd Language, FTW!
+1 If you struggle with Ochem, BUY THIS BOOK
http://www.amazon.com/Organic-Chemi...ywords=organic+chemistry+as+a+second+language
Anyone who got an A (or A- i suppose) who wants to share their secrets would be most appreciated.
By the end of organic chemistry, it had become crystal clear to me that it's all about obtaining the lowest possible energy state.
Also, get ready to put in the time. It's just a time-intensive course, not an incredibly difficult one.
to be honest, people make orgo into something its not. It just requires more time and effort. Dont let the name and the "horror" stories stray you from your path. its just one class, put your hours in and you will be just fine
dont buy a model kit. they take too much time and aren't very accurate anyway