O-chem 2...and my feelings of inadequacy

[FSUMED]

Ok, I am about to finish O-chem 1 with an A. Funny thing is, never in my life have I felt like I know so much yet so little. I mean I guess I understood things well enough to get an A, but there is a lot of stuff I still dont understand, and I constantly have to back and look at old reactions because I cant remember them. I am taking O-chem 2 in teh fall and I am afraid that I am going to get a rude awakening. I know it is harder, and I will also be taking 17 hours including the o-chem lab, physics 1, and A&P, which is considerably more demanding than my current schedule. I guess I am just afraid that I wont be able to cut it. I am probably just a dork worry wart, but I can't help it. I think the real problem is that I have kind reached that point where I am no longer just thinking about Med school. It is like now or never...either I make it happen or I dont. I am going into my junior year(yes I am a little behind, but I will have them all by MCAT time in the spring) and I am having all these feelings of inadequacy. Did anybody else go through this. Did you ever feel that despite you were doing well in your classes that you would...Never get into med school? Or That if you did you would never be able to memorize and learn all that stuff? Maybe I feel like my good grades have been luck so far...I dont know... I just worry that when push comes to shove, I will choke and end up dropping out and then moving into a trailer park in a place calld Buzzard's roost? I welcome any words of encouregment and/or stories or personal experiences with feelings of premed inadequacy...

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[moo]

Funny, I felt the opposite. I got a B- in Ochem I, even though I feel I mastered the material. After all, I was getting A's on the midterms (I really bombed the final). I felt I liked OChem II more. It made more sense to me. However, I still bombed the final, getting a B (after getting A's on the midterms). At any rate, I still felt I knew the material down COLD. A year later, I took the MCAT and did not study organic AT ALL because I was so confident in my abilities. I was right as I felt the MCAT organic was very easy. (However, I'm sure most people felt that way, but coming onto this board after the test made me realize that most people DID NOT feel that way, as supposedly the BS section on my form on the April 01 MCAT was a killer)

At any rate, I think we all feel inadequate sometimes. For me, I felt like I was so stupid after getting A's on the midterms and bombing the final each time. It's natural to doubt yourself but I feel that if you're a strong person, you'll ALWAYS come out of it, no matter how bad you do or how inadequate you feel.

 

[Smoke This]

FSUMED: I felt that way all the time! I got into upper-level classes in my major (mathematics) last year, and suddenly I was doing a lot worse academically than I ever had, and I was starting to really question the med school thing. Talk about being afraid you can't cut it! I was a wreck for a while, and started to really doubt myslef at times. I was also worried about choking, not being able to memorize it all, etc. What you need to do is really learn to budget your time if you are worried about not being able to study enough. If it's just general worry, people everywhere have gone through, and are going through now, exactly the things you are.

Keep your head up and stay focused on what you need to do. What's the worst that can happen? If you screw up in a few classes, put off applying until after you graduate to retake classes, beef up your GPA, etc. You could use the extra time to do more extracurriculars and really improve your chances. So, don't worry. If FSU is anything like my university, organic II is mainly synthesis and uses a lot of what you already learned. If you cut it last semester, you'll do fine.

 

[Atlas]

Organic isn't the big, bad monster people conceive it to be. Many teachers try to stuff all this material down your throat without you understanding what's really going on. There IS a reason behind every bond forming/breaking, etc. Also, NEVER try to memorize the material. That's the worst thing you can do! It's best to be able to think through the bulk of the problems/mechanisms/reactions and then memorize the stuff that MUST be committed to memory (e.g. cation stabilities, or allylic radical stabilities). I didn't find organic as scary as people made it out to be. My girlfriend's dad is a chemical engineer and he told me "Good luck..you're gonna need it!" lol It's really not that bad. You have to study nearly EVERYDAY, though. I did and I got a B in Org I and an A in Org II. Best of luck to ya!