medicinal chemistry or advanced inorganic chem harder?

[dnp321]

for pharmacy students that majored in chemistry during college: how would you rank the following classes in difficulty?
advanced inorganic chem
medicinal chemistry for pharmaceutical sciences
pharmacology
physical chemistry
organic chemistry (introductory course for pre-med)
quantum mechanics

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[RxPreceptor]

Organic chemistry < pharmacology < medicinal chemistry < physical chemistry < advanced inorganic (graduate level) < quantum mechanics (most difficult). This is somewhat bias for me because more difficult subjects are often ones that are boring, ones which have little interest, or real world applications for a career.

DNP referring to Dinitrophenol?

 

[ldiot]

All I can say is that physical chemistry is very, VERY hard.

 

[Ladyg228]

Physical chemistry tops the list 100%!! that class was dreadful and had to do both P Chem I & II! 😱😱😱

 

[lord999]

Advanced Inorganic (if taught with organometallic/high energy which has PChem as a prerequisite) > Physical Chemistry > Quantum Mechanics (if taught seriously) >>>> Medicinal Chemistry (if taught seriously with Instrumental Analysis and inclusive of Pharmacognosy/Nautral Products Chemistry) > Pharmacology = Organic Chemistry

Most enjoyable elective class at the graduate level = High energyThermalOChem with government-paid field trip to Sandia Proving Grounds. It is not particularly hard to make an organic compound with a huge negative delta H. It is really, really hard to make that reaction detonation controllable (which after the second week where you get over the Snidely Whiplash high, detonation engineering and control theory is the major part of the class).

 

[RxPreceptor]

I really miss instrument analysis...so useful, skills can translate so well into everyday activity.

 

[lord999]

I really miss instrument analysis...so useful, skills can translate so well into everyday activity.

At the very least by teaching one to not carelessly make a mess on a pharmacy counter and being methodical about the work. It's a real pet peeve of mine (especially in retail) if the counter has crap all over the place as the situation is asking for a misfill or misbagged incident. No, I'm not so OCD that it has to be med insert flagged up or the label has to be perfect, and busy times means a messier counter for workload reasons, I just want to see each fill as a discrete entity and not have to worry that Mrs. Smith's birth control is possibly bagged with Mr. Jones's sidenafil (no relation).

 

[tussiN1]

What makes inorganic difficult? I thought it would be a basic extension of Gen Chem I and II. Do you need to have an innate talent for chemistry to do well in these advanced chemistry courses?

 

[RxPreceptor]

I was getting at being able to fix machines, printers, automation units, etc. in a fast paced manner rather than having to work around technology inconveniences and wait on a maintenance person to show up. Not to mention counseling with drug delivery devices, lancing devices, etc. Sorry if I appeared to type sarcastically.

 

[lord999]

What makes inorganic difficult? I thought it would be a basic extension of Gen Chem I and II. Do you need to have an innate talent for chemistry to do well in these advanced chemistry courses?

Inorganic Chemistry's relationship to General Chemistry is like Arithmetic Guess and Check to Algebra or Real Analysis to a standard version of Calculus (non-proof version so the Spivak text is an exception). So, all those random little facts you learn in General Chemistry like activity series, coordination chemistry, crystal formation, and things you gloss over like the transition elements, f orbital elements, and practical magnetism as a chemical force (you don't cover that in Gen Chem because you don't have the math knowledge to deal with fields), you get to revisit at the hard core level where you actually end up not only relearning the what, but the why. That's really not easy, and the transition elements especially when you end up combining that with OCchem, that combination called Bioinorganic gets real messy. I think the hardest concept to really do the mechanisms for is catalyzed reactions where you actually do the mechanistic transition metals and organic compounds between what the rules are for the organic component and what goes on with basically everything but C, H, O, or a terminal halide becomes really tricky to keep up with as you need to know within the situation WHEN the inorganic mechanisms work and when the organic mechanisms work and timing them. The payoff in the end is that you can actually derive most of the "rules" on a fundamental basis for the traditional Inorganic field. Relevant to pharmacy, far overkill unless you're dealing with instrumental analysis.

 

[BidingMyTime]

Organic chemistry < pharmacology < medicinal chemistry < physical chemistry < advanced inorganic (graduate level) < quantum mechanics (most difficult). This is somewhat bias for me because more difficult subjects are often ones that are boring, ones which have little interest, or real world applications for a career. DNP referring to Dinitrophenol?

OK, I admittedly haven't had all of those classes, but I mostly agree (haha, I've never had an official quantum mechanic class, but the little I know about it, I would definitely put it at the top of the list.)

Although I would put medicinal chemistry<pharmacology, but that may have been from how I related to my professor's teaching styles of those 2 classes.

 

[tussiN1]

Advanced Inorganic (if taught with organometallic/high energy which has PChem as a prerequisite) > Physical Chemistry > Quantum Mechanics (if taught seriously) >>>> Medicinal Chemistry (if taught seriously with Instrumental Analysis and inclusive of Pharmacognosy/Nautral Products Chemistry) > Pharmacology = Organic Chemistry

Most enjoyable elective class at the graduate level = High energyThermalOChem with government-paid field trip to Sandia Proving Grounds. It is not particularly hard to make an organic compound with a huge negative delta H. It is really, really hard to make that reaction detonation controllable (which after the second week where you get over the Snidely Whiplash high, detonation engineering and control theory is the major part of the class).

It must be a pet peeve when you hear "chemistry is just like pharmacy." Chemistry courses after organic chemistry seems a lot more brutal than pharmacology, med. chem and therapeutics looking at your description.

 

[lord999]

No, not really. Chemistry used to be much like pharmacy, except that pharmacy was actually legitimately hard if you graduated in the era where you had to do Remington's. If counted as an undergraduate major, it had the same reputation as chemical engineering for failing out students until they nerfed the curriculum. As a rule, any class that you go over older material but are told that you have to prove the fundamentals of why this would work is almost always a harder class.

By the way, quantum and most modern physics are straightforward mathematically and the standard class is not viewed as a singularly difficult one for the physics majors. Most of the mystique surrounding quantum in particular is comes from the popular science literature written by math illiterate journalists by trying to extrapolate from some physicists analogies trying to explain to someone without that sort of a background (cat and strange loop). At the time of invention, the problem was that most physicists did not have the mathematical background (and in some cases like tensors, the branch of mathematics did not yet exist) to deal with the problems. Flash forward to the 21st century where linear algebra, modern differential equations include PDE, abstract algebra, and tensors are part of the standard undergraduate engineering (not even science) curriculum, and the explanations for quantum mechanics becomes a lot more realistic than mystique. It's just that most writers outside science don't bother to learn the math or even science to write this up. The really hard classes in physics are the ones that are formalist in nature or the math prerequisites. Real analysis in math as one of the physics prerequisites for the formalism class is widely thought to be an extremely difficult class (I had to take the class for graduate statistics using measure theory, and I thought this was the hardest class I ever took, hands down). I never had to take the formalist modern physics class, but the proofs version of quantum and wave is also known to be difficult.

 

[tussiN1]

is med chem and pharmacology considered easier because it is more practical and hence more practice problems means proficiency, while advanced inorganic and pchem are considered difficult because it is more abstract and either you get it or don't? in another words, you need a certain IQ to grasp advanced inorganic chem and quantum?

 

[lord999]

Any subject is hard if you don't have the prerequisites. Physical Chemistry and Advanced Inorganic surprise most chem (and pharmacy) majors where its a cumulative review of your Calculus, Differential, and Physics as well as Chemistry and most walk in underprepared for the rigor. If you binged and purged during that year, expect to fail out. Most people do come into Pharmacology or Medicinal Chemistry for Graduate Majors already having some former gate class that wakes them up to how serious it is. Signal transduction in detail (pharmacology), SAR and crystallography and now biotechnology in SME form (medicinal chemistry) are a real PITA at the graduate level and is for the serious.

There's a game in the pharmacy graduate school for "hardest" major. We kind of agreed during my period that was industrial Pharmaceutics, which has several multidisciplinary issues where you had to have the process chemical engineering, the mathematics of advanced kinetics, and the physical chemistry knowledge of synthesis to even walk into the Doctoral Written. You don't specialize in any one of them unlike the majors in each, but the general knowledge requirements were all MS level to sit for the exam. So, a pharmaceutics major if they were serious could be backup for basically anything but pharmacology or clinical trails.

For my program, I could have done graduate economics with mathematics (in fact, I was consistently the TA the failout class for graduate microeconomics using Mas-Colell) or graduate mathematical statistics (Jun Shao's book) without any real transition difficulty. And I taught (and still teach) the computer science graduate level algorithms and numerical methods class (Corless) even though that's a secondary topic for my program. We took the same doctoral subject qualifiers for our own Doctoral Written. The difference is that we don't take the advanced ones that are department level and just take more general ones. The only advanced ones you elect to take have to do with what your program does.

Oh, something else. I am very certain that I lost out on somewhere between $400k and $600k of income in opportunity costs if I worked as hard at work for the time I spent in grad school. That's ok, I made that up actually (but that was not the plan), but I didn't need to. You don't go to grad school for financial reasons, you go for career and power reasons. I am a pharmacist, but if you meet me in government, that's not all I am, and also, it really doesn't matter, I'll always have the seniority, technical experience, and choice of jobs for the specialized knowledge. That's what I wanted, so I left happy. I feel pity for those who went to graduate school not knowing what the work environment is like afterwards.