You sound kinda like me! During my senior year, I wanted to have some "fun" and take a graduate o-chem course "Physical Organic Chemistry" at Stanford, taught by my favorite instructor Prof. Justin Du Bois, who also taught one of my undergraduate o-chem courses (it was his class that really put a learning curve on my knowledge and understanding of organic chemistry/mechanisms, and the rest of o-chem after that class indeed felt like a breeze). The book we used primary for the graduate adv. o-chem course was _Modern Physical Organic Chemistry_ by Anslyn & Dougherty. It was something I found interesting b/c we tackled organic chemistry mostly from a molecular orbital theory perspective (and having done computational chemistry 4 yrs prior, this was kind of like coming full circle). It wasn't an easy course, as the grad students there had much more knowledge than the ~4 undergrads incl. me taking the course. The exams were very very difficult, but it was a pretty neat experience anyway. Despite the challenges, it was nice to tackle a subject I felt "fluent" in from the undergrad courses, and even though I don't remember that much of the details from the grad class, the concepts and thought-process are still with me. I felt like it was a good opportunity to do something mostly as an exercise in trying to hone the thinking-process, as much as I felt doing retrosynthetic analysis did for me beyond o-chem.
My degree was in Biological Sciences, btw.
🙂
One of our biochemistry courses on metabolism was also heavily o-chem oriented which I really enjoyed, too (enzyme reaction mechanisms, kind of a twist b/c you have to have some intuition about reactivity before you can "break" rules due to the fact you've got the enzyme aiding you! ^^ )
I'm always happy to hear from fans of o-chem b/c for me, it was much more than reactions and mechanisms, and I wish more undergrads in science who take it could appreciate the subject more (it was never a "memorization class" for me!)
I hope you will choose to take something like that when you have the time! Once in a lifetime for me (b/c seriously...I doubt I'll ever go that deep into that kind of subject again as I go through learning about medicine).
Cheers!
Have any of you all taken advanced o-chem classes? For me, organic chemistry has been the only science class where I've actually felt fluent in the subject matter without having to study tons! I really like the subject, but I'd also like to take some other chem/bio classes. Has anyone loved their advanced o-chem class? I'd love to hear about it, thanks!
