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O Chem
- Thread starter ThNeal
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Organic Chemistry isn't as hard as people make it out to be. It only becomes difficult when you are cramming for your exams. The best advice is to always be on top of the lecture and review what you learn every day if not every other day. My Organic Chemistry I was hard because I always crammed it into a day or two before the exam. However, for my Organic Chemistry II course, I took the honors section. In this section, we always had a quiz in each class that made us keep up with the materials. Thus, when it came to the exam time, I had already about 90% of the materials memorized and they had become second-hand.
Organic isn't that difficult like others have said. Again, just be on top of things.
That being said, the way I did it was read the chapter before lecture and supplement it with Freelance Teacher who explains really well and just gives you repetition before the professor even teaches it, and when you get to lecture it's even more repetition so you're set!
I highly recommend Freelance Teacher on youtube
That being said, the way I did it was read the chapter before lecture and supplement it with Freelance Teacher who explains really well and just gives you repetition before the professor even teaches it, and when you get to lecture it's even more repetition so you're set!
I highly recommend Freelance Teacher on youtube
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Ochem is not difficult, but it is completely different from general chemistry. Stay on top of the lecture notes and do as well as you can in ochem 1, because ochem 2 builds on the concepts learned in ochem 1.
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chads videos are amazing!!!!
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easy to say after you've taken it and aced it after working your ass off, then forget that you really worked hard.
LOL
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Advice is to do a lot of practice problems on the book, online supplemental problems (if your professor uses it)
Also, if your university provides SI sessions, go to those as well as they help a lot.
Make flash cards every time you learn a new reaction mechanism.
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It's not so hard that you need to be studying before class starts.
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I agree with this, I love those books as a supplement like you said, but I would add that for my particular Organic 1 class, it was beneficial to have the book. The professor said in the beginning that we could get any ol' organic book, but that was bad advice because he taught from the current edition of the course text section by section.
The problem is that so many reactions in organic can go backwards and forwards, or there is some, "subtle," difference in the product when its done in the presence of a base instead of an acid. The Organic Chem As a Second Language books do a very good job of succinctly teaching *reasons* for this. However, if you're looking through just that little book, or some other random textbook, you spend too much time deciphering whether you're looking at the forward/backwards/acid/base etc. reaction, when maybe only one of those is going to be on your upcoming test.
That is, you want to truly understand organic, but you also want to pass your stinking tests, so the latter imposes some order in which you learn the material. To keep moving with your class's natural order, just do the easiest thing, which probably means buy the right textbook.
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I'm taking organic 2 at Berkeley, and we're using the text written by Vollhardt. It's heavier in mechanisms than organic 1. Luckily my mom's boss (go figure) hooked me up with a professor who tutors this subject online. His website is "PhD Organic Chemistry Tutor."
Finally everything makes sense. I never thought I'd be saying this about organic, but I'm actually starting to like it. Once I understood nearly everything is in constant equilibrium, the mechanisms became easier to understand.There are plenty of informative articles and self help items on the professor's site.
Finally everything makes sense. I never thought I'd be saying this about organic, but I'm actually starting to like it. Once I understood nearly everything is in constant equilibrium, the mechanisms became easier to understand.There are plenty of informative articles and self help items on the professor's site.
I found it very helpful to write out every mechanism and learn the details of each step. It may seem tedious for ochem 1 but I breezed ochem 2 because many of the mechanisms followed a similar pattern. Just make sure to do all the problems you have access to and ask your professor about questions or concepts that you may have difficulties with. I did use Khan academy's videos but I also found that a molecular modeling kit helped me grasp some of the visual concepts such as the different conformations. It is not a hard class at all, just do not fall behind.
