Hardest part of Organic Chem?

[OnMyWayThere]

I am about to start the first half of 1 year OChem...

In General Chem, most people found acid-base titrations to be the most difficult subject.

To those of you who have had OChem, what was the hardest subject in OChem?


Thanks in advance,
J

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[lyragrl]

Stereochemistry was the least intuitive for me. It wasn't hard, exactly, I just had to spend some time thinking about it before I got it. If you're not good at visualizing 3-D structures in your head, get a model kit and use it a lot. (Some teachers allow you to use them during exams.)

After that, the most difficult thing was the sheer volume of reactions. I think the best way to learn reactions is: 1) Learn one reaction a day--without fail. 2) Remember to think about both reactants and products. For example, when you start to memorize, learn reactions from alkyl haldes and reactions to produce alkyl halides (or alcohols, ketones, whatever).

Good luck!

 

[thackl]

If you learn where the electrons want to be and understand basic acid/base chem, then most reactions will be intuitive.

A lot of students in my class also struggled with steriochem at first. Being an engineer and used to manipulating things in 3D CAD, I found it rather easy. There will be some rnn's in org2 that are not intuitive and require memorization. Overall, it was not that bad.

 

[AvgApplcnt]

like the dude above me said, O-chem is easy if you understand electrons. just know what electrons like and you'll be set. other than that, o-chem is just memorization that anybody can do. i found it to be a complete waste of time since all you do is memorize. very little intuitive thinking involved cuz electrons tell you everything.

 

[DrHuang]

i really enjoyed ochem because my professor was a great teacher. id say the 1st part of ochem is relatively easy while the 2nd part gets a bit more confusing...especially when you have to learn reaction mechanism after reaction mechanism.

 

[mlw03]

i'll agree with the other guys about understanding electrons. my prof did a lot on resonance and once you see what the most stable resonance structures are it's easy to see what reaction will occur. i disagree with the guy about memorizing reactions - i don't think it's possible simply because of the sheer volume. a prof can always throw something new onto an exam and you can be sure the AAMC can do the same. you have to really understand the movement of the elctrons, and then when you do it really does become very intuitive.

 

[Ragzpie]

Flashcards. Flashcards. Flashcards.

I completely agree with the above posters that you need to understand where the electrons are going and why. Learning reaction mechanisms (even if they say you don't have to) really helps out with this.

On the front an index card, draw the reagents and on the back, draw the products and the mechanism. When studying, look at the front of the card, think about the reagents, and use your intuition to draw out the product and mechanism. This method will help you learn the reactions and master the art of "electron-pushing."

Organic Chemistry is one of those classes that really tests your study skills and not your aptitude. Try to skim the reading before class, take copious notes, then closely read the material and then recopy your notes. Tedious, I know - but I think this method almost guarantees an A.

Good luck!!!

 

[lyragrl]

I completely agree that knowing how to push electrons is one of the most important things to know in organic chemisty. But I was answering the question what was the *hardest* part of organic chemistry. To me, the most challenging aspect of organic chemistry was making sure you can mentally organize a large volume of material.

Yes, you should definitely know instinctively how the electrons move and why. Not only will this help you understand reactions, but it will also give you a great leg up on complex mechanism problems. But, if you prof asks syntheses questions on exams (and mine did a lot) then you need to know a large arsenal of reactions as well.

Orgo is not straight memorization. Not by a long shot. There's a ton of problem solving, which is the fun part. But I think most organic classes also involve a lot of memorization as well.

 

[mlw03]

i suppose i should clarify my earlier comment. i never had to do any synthesis reactions (i took a condensed orgo/biochem sequence and synthesis got the ax) so maybe some memorization is required to do that part. but here's the trick: understand a mechanism type (say Aldol condensations) and then when you get a nasty looking molecule with lots of different R-group types, just look for what will react and then everything else is just a really big R group that you can ignore.

 

[thackl]

OK, there is a bunch of memorization too. But once you know the starting reagents, most rxn's are intuitive. The few that aren't were the most difficult IMO.

 

[umass rower]

The hardest part in my O-chem class was a professor who would get most of the way through a reaction, realize he'd done something wrong in the first step, and then go back and do the whole thing over again. He would also lose electrons and reagents on a regular basis. In short, he was an awful teacher and as a result I now know almost nothing of organic. Screwed me on the MCAT.

 

[jefras99]

My ochem 2 prof didn't speak english very well. It was fun time.

 

[Nanon]

Here's how I learned organic chemistry, or at least some of it. I've been meaning to put more reactions into words, but haven't found the time.

I also found flashcards really helpful, as well as just sitting and doing a million problems for each section. What also really, really helped was going to and understanding each lab.

Good luck to you!

Nanon

 

[OrthoFixation]

These suggestions are right on track. I also made my own flashcards. Many rxns to memorize. Knowing what reagent likes to do in a given reactant environment (again follow the e-) will really help. After Org I/II, the MCAT Org seemed a breeze.

 

[deleted9493]

I agree with what the previous posters said about understanding how to push electrons. This concept may not make sense to you right now but it will in a few months.

I was never big on flashcards. Rather than use flashcards, I was fond of writing the reaction mechanisms out over and over again. After doing this for awhile, seeing how electrons will behave in reactions became much more obvious.

During the second semester, I often tried to keep ahead of the professor by predicting what he was going to say....or what he was going to give the product of any given reaction to be. This certainly made me an active learner in the classroom and made studying for exams/quizzes to be very manageable.

The hardest part of organic chemistry (for me) was organic synthesis. This wasn't too hard when you had all the time in the world...like on homework sets but when test time rolls around and the professor asks you to do 2-3 somewhat complex syntheses...in addition to the myriad other questions he would ask, timing was of the essence.

It's a challenging course but certainly an enjoyable one...provided that you are willing to put in the time and effort to do well. You'll hate organic chemistry if you don't try to understand electron movement...and simply opt to memorize overall reactions. Actually, not only will you hate it...you will find that there are too many to simply memorize and your grade will be indicative of this fact. Understand electrons!

 

[ASDIC]

the hardest part about organic chem II is the number of reactions u will need to memorize at the end. I counted as many 500 reactions with over 100 mechanisms. I recommend to scribble out the reactions a dozen times to drill them into your head.

 

[KirsteenB]

Hey there,

Given the massive sizes of our organic chemistry classes, and given that our prof had supposedly been ordered not to bell any of our class marks, he often seemed to select the whackiest little reactions to put on an exam. In addition, he liked to test our understanding of concepts in addition to the rote memorization; therefore, the toughest part of orgo was to, in a relatively short period of time, attain a good grasp of the forces driving reactions, as well as a well-memorized armory of reactions.

On reading the above posts, all of the above approaches sound good. One key thing is to quickly determine which strategy works best for you. One approach that I took for memorizing reactions hasn't yet been listed, but I found it very effective. So effective, in fact, that one year later, when I went to revitalize my orgo knowledge for the MCAT, the reactions came back to mind extremely quickly, allowing a good bit of confidence and time-recouping during the Biological Sciences section of the MCAT.

The approach basically involves grouping all the reactions into families. So there is the family of alkane reactions (not very many), alkene reactions (there were 6 major types (halo-additions, water additions, oxygen additions, etc., with sub-types in each category), alkynes, aromatics, and so on. For each family I made sure that I could state the family name, give the number of reaction sub-types within each, and then systematically write the name of all the different types of reactions within it. I then made sure I could draw the specifics of each reaction, e.g., mechanism, reagents, etc., and would practice this by writing these schemes down over and over again. It is basically a top-down approach: start with the macro and end with the micro level of detail for each group.

It takes a lot of time to master this approach, but the paybacks are huge. I found that, on exams where I was given either a product or reactant or odd reagent, I could zip through those sections--obscure little reactions and all--really quickly. I'd just simply list the reactions at the beginning of the test, or most often than not, I'd recognize a weird reagent, e.g. the Raney nickel, and would be able to name the reaction, cold. The reactions were all stored "up there" and easy to obtain. On the MCAT, like I mentioned, when it came to studying the reactions (and you will have to know the reactions for the MCAT) they came back really quickly and I was able to answer a couple of the more odd, one-off discrete MCAT questions that dealt with those more unusual types of reactions--the naughty one that I found tucked in as a discrete was the Wittig (the tip-off being the phosphorus reagent).

Whatever approach you take, best of luck! 🙂

Kirsteen

 

[....]

I counted as many 500 reactions with over 100 mechanisms.

No way in heck.

There MAY be 100 reactions in all of ochem 1 and 2.

 

[Dr.Linus]

I enjoyed Organic Chemistry class and learned the concepts and reactions etc. and MCAT orgo then was very easy for me.

The way I went about it was to study from many books. I studied

A primer to reaction mechanisms in Organic Chemistry by Peter Sykes

Electron Flow in Organic Chemistry by Paul Scudder

Pushing Electrons by Daniel Weeks

and did problems from many text books other than our own.

GoodLuck!

 

[nanosomic]

actually the best advice is do not fall behind on your mechanisms and do a lot of practice especially if you are on a semester system. The semester system makes o.chem difficult because by the time you have a midterm you would have covered tons of confusing mechanisms and syntheses already.

 

[Anka]

I had a lot of fun with orgo, and nothing was particularly probematic. My advice would be, read the chapter, work lots of problems, then figure out what you still need to memorize. Memorization can be a crutch, and if you don't learn concepts and ideas, you're going to get slammed with too much info. If you keep track of what's going on and why, you'll not often find something you can't just figure out on the fly if, god forbid, you run into something you totally can't remember on a test. Also, just working lots of problems will give you a better idea of what topics are high yield, and which you should just ignore or come back to if you have time. As far as going to class, I just skipped that part and did fine. Orgo is orgo is orgo. There aren't any real tricks.

 

[mattorama]

I'm going to go a different way with organic...it is nothing but memorization. It will go like so...you have a chemical group X attatched to a bunch of other stuff that doesn't matter reacting with another molecule with a chemical group Y + a bunch of other crap that doesn't matter....then you do the same thing every time you see those generic groups under similar conditions. Organic is 10% thinking and 90% memorization. You will have to memorize a bunch of general stuff and merely be able to apply it, or something nearly identical, to "new" situations which aren't really all that new. The only "hard" part is being able to figure out what parts of the reacting molecules is actually important...after that it is just rote stuff. Don't worry about the synthesis stuff It isn't bad and the only part of organic that was even remotely interesting. Soooo...despite the flaming I will get for this post, all you have to do is memorize a bunch of stuff. That is the hardest part.

I spoke to both of my organic profs about the memorization thing (I wanted to know what lvl of chem you need to take before you can ACTUALLY understand and be able to predict new reactions you have never seen.). They told me that you CAN'T really reason through new reactions they way people on this thread claim. They told me it is about memorizing. Chemistry is for the most part an experimental (like bio) and not a theoretical science, and those reaction mechanisms found in your book were discovered after a lot of experimentation, not some theoretical chemist deriving them from basic laws then merely trying to verify through experimentation.

I don't know how many med school profs I have had (teaching non-med school courses) that they shouldn't even require organic for med school. You will use NOTHING from it except maybe a little nomenclature in biochm. It is just a good basic class to compare premeds across the country to see if people can memorize a bunch of stuff and do BASIC problem solving. Go get 'em tiger.

 

[SaltySqueegee]

Two acronyms: HOMOs and LUMOs

I thought for the first two weeks of O-Chem that my professor had some moral/ethical qualms with the sexually diverse. He explained every other O-Chem topic well except for Molecular Bonding Orbital Theory.

Damn... gotta watch out for those HOMOs... hehe