What Were Your Strategies to Conquer Organic Chemistry

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bengirlxD

bengirlxD

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Hey Guys,

I will start organic I this coming semester and I keep getting bombarded by students about how hard organic is going to be. I took Gen chem my freshmen year and though I found the course work challenging, I was able to pull out A's thanks to doing countless problems over and over again before the test. I don't know if this is the right strategy since organic is a completely different "genre" of chemistry but I just wanted to ask how did you guys manage to get A's or B's in Organic and what were your studying strategies?
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  1. Do lots and lots of problems - even better if the professor rather than your textbook made the problems!
  2. Teach other people problems and concepts - by explaining things and having other people ask questions, you are able to learn and retain more yourself
  3. Do a little bit every day - orgo is something that you can cram if necessary, but it's a lot better if you pace yourself (source: I paced myself in orgo 1 and crammed in orgo 2)
  4. Ask for help sooner rather than later - organic chemistry is challenging and it's better to ask for a floatation device when you can still tread water rather than when you're drowning
  5. Keep your mind healthy - do things you enjoy to keep your mind in tip-top shape because mindset and attitude are important, not just for orgo, but for surviving the entirety of this process
 
WedgeDawg said:
  1. Do lots and lots of problems - even better if the professor rather than your textbook made the problems!
  2. Teach other people problems and concepts - by explaining things and having other people ask questions, you are able to learn and retain more yourself
  3. Do a little bit every day - orgo is something that you can cram if necessary, but it's a lot better if you pace yourself (source: I paced myself in orgo 1 and crammed in orgo 2)
  4. Ask for help sooner rather than later - organic chemistry is challenging and it's better to ask for a floatation device when you can still tread water rather than when you're drowning
  5. Keep your mind healthy - do things you enjoy to keep your mind in tip-top shape because mindset and attitude are important, not just for orgo, but for surviving the entirety of this process
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Thanks! My school actually has a complementary course called Organic I problems ( 1 credit) that is thought by my lecturer. I'm signing up for that since it hits number 1 on your list
 
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I liked to turn my notes into a study guide and rewrite it a few times from memory. That way if I got stuck on a test I could just write out a portion of the 'cheat' sheet. Also see above about doing problems, organic chemistry is the first science class for a lot of students where hard work just dosen't cut it. You have to learn how to think too and doing problems help a lot. That is not to say it is particularly harder than other science classes, its just the first science class that requires some critical thinking IMHO
 
There are a lot of similar threads on SDN which will contain valuable tips if you use the search feature. However, most of the answers can be summarized by WedgeDawg's post above.

I'll particularly emphasize the first bullet point. I was a tutor for Organic for my Junior and Senior years, and at my school, I don't consider Organic a subject which you can do well in through brute force memorization (though it might be possible if you have enough free time). You need to develop a new way of thinking. You need to learn how to "speak" Organic. Maybe memorization can help with the "vocabulary" (basic mechanisms, trends in electronegativity, reactivity, strong and weak nucleophiles), but if you don't develop the "grammar" (critical thinking and problem solving skills in an OChem context), then you'll end up a babbling American tourist in a slum in Central America, trying to find the bathroom. In this metaphor, the exams will be the shady guys coming at you with pocket knives in a dark alley.
 
I'll chime in here. O-Chem was the first course I felt like I knew the material well enough to teach, hence my becoming a TA.

1) Obtain past material from your professor. Talk to students who've taken him/her before and get your hands on past exams and problem sets. This is usually not against university rules.
2) Don't let material that you don't know overlap. That being said, study daily.
3) Go to office hours. In pre-req courses, you can expect that about half (not a hard fact, just something I've personally found to be true most of the time) of the students know about as much as you or more. It's up to you to be proactive and seek help. There is no better person you could ask or tutorial you could watch to get an idea of what your exams will be like. Do not be afraid to ask questions. And write down your questions as you go so you don't forget them. It sucks to sit for an entire office hour trying to remember what you didn't understand and then leave and in 5 minutes you know exactly what you were confused with.
4) TEACH! I have never learned more than by teaching the material and mechanistic details to other students. This is by far the biggest thing that has helped me in learning organic chemistry. Organic chem is a subject where sitting and talking over the details does me more justice than hearing someone mention them once or twice and then writing notes. Review your notes and learn the material well enough to teach other students.
5) Study. This seems obvious but once you go to class 3-5 days a week and write notes for an hour a day, many people forget to devote time outside of the classroom to studying and doing problem sets. For every hour you spend in class, spend 2.5 hours outside of the classroom studying on your own. There is no extracurricular activity that is worth doing to the point where you don't have time outside of class to study- and that goes for any course you will ever take in undergrad.

Good luck. Organic chemistry is not that hard. It's simply the one of the first courses that requires your typical entitled, 4.0 high school student to learn new material from scratch that they previously didn't know.
 
1. Read ahead, or better yet, attend lectures twice. Stuff like acid/base chemistry, stereochemistry, and SN/E are easier to make sense of once you're familiar with the lecture/reading.
2. Familiarize yourself with orgo exams. If you're at a large school, practice tests shouldn't be too difficult to track down.
3. Fix any test-taking anxiety issues you may have. At many schools, organic chemistry professors don't expect you to regurgitate information, and you may be expected to apply what you know on an exam in an efficient fashion.
 
Fantastic advice in this thread. Everything you really need to know has been said here. Practice problems are key. I'd like to add: don't be intimidated by the class. People at my school would look at me like I was headed to the gallows when I told them I had o-chem, but it's really not that bad.
 
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I know people are saying not to memorize, but I made tons of flash cards with the reactions. Reactants on one side products on the other and studied them looking at both sides at different times (not a perfect system, as there are many ways to obtain the same product). But this will make the multisteps much easier. So much of orgo is memorization. After you have them memorized, you have to apply them. But as I made flash cards the class became one of the easiest I've ever had.

It is obviously important to understand why the reactions occur though (mechanisms, -philes, etc).

And teaching is an excellent way to learn.
 
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My strategy for organic chemistry consisted of:

1) Skim your book before the lecture.
2) Pay attention to the professor and participate in the class (this is great for getting a LOR).
3) Go to your book, read it deeply and make brief notes.
4) Review your notes then proceed to practice with the set of problems that brings your book and do any practice problems included in your course.
5) Review every problem and relearn why it's right or wrong (if you left something out of your notes, add those details).
6) If there are practice tests around your school, take them under exam conditions (timed, no phones, etc.). See what you got wrong and add those details (not the exact problem, just the theory behind that problem).
8) Repeat 4-6.
9) The day before the exam, review your notes and take those practice tests again under exam conditions.
10) For exams 2,3,4...use the same strategy and briefly review notes from the past material.

  • Sounds time consuming but the total time for this strategy was around 16-18 hours per exam (not much).
  • If you have a light schedule you can practice with your study group. I would have loved to do this but due to work schedule and other harder sciences courses, it was not possible.
  • My lowest grade was 97 vs. the class average that was around 57.
  • As the course proceeds, a lot of reaction are going to covered. I would recommend to use anki in order to review them.
 
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Something that helped me in BioChem, which I found to be more difficult than orgo and at our school its a class taken together with 1st year med students. I took this class while studying for MCAT's + working in my lab 20 hours a week so I had to step up my game when it came to studying responsibly.

After taking notes in class, I'd thoroughly rewrite my notes within a few days as if somebody was going to read through them in order to learn from them. Invest in a multicolor pen if you can lol this took my notes + oganization to a whole new level, my biggest regret was not utilizing this tool until my senior year... Anyways, I made sure there was no part of the notes that I did not understand, using the textbook, internet, or office hours to gain more insight into things that may not have been clear during class. You'll review content, be able to teach the content (like others have said, VERY helpful when you understand something enough for you to teach others), and easily remember the concepts you conquered when you look back at your notes, which will also be easy to read/review since you made them that way. Do NOT wait until the week before the exam to try and learn concepts you did not understand, do it right away and build upon it. It will also allow you to gain more from your lectures with a more solid foundation of the things you had previously learned.

I started reviewing my notes 2 weeks before exams, and the week before the exam I did a bunch of practice problems / past exams and reviewed whatever I was having trouble with. But studying like this, I found myself acing these practice exams anyways 😉

This strategy was super effective for me in one of my busiest semesters. I'm sure it will work for any science class, you can't rely on cramming in difficult courses like these since exams go way beyond just memorizing material.

Good luck!
 
lots and lots of practice problems until you make no mistakes
 
bengirlxD said:
Hey Guys,

I will start organic I this coming semester and I keep getting bombarded by students about how hard organic is going to be. I took Gen chem my freshmen year and though I found the course work challenging, I was able to pull out A's thanks to doing countless problems over and over again before the test. I don't know if this is the right strategy since organic is a completely different "genre" of chemistry but I just wanted to ask how did you guys manage to get A's or B's in Organic and what were your studying strategies?
Click to expand...



1) Learn to draw Hexagons.

Everything else just kind of falls into place after that.
 
doc_mcd94 said:
Don't memorize. Learn the concepts and understand why certain reactions occur.
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I mostly agree, but don't completely forego memorization. I don't think I made an attempt to memorize anything in Org 1, and that was a good approach. Second semester involves a lot of reagents that have mechanisms that are either unknown or way over your head. You will not be able to "understand" why a given reagents work for a one reaction, but not a similar one. I did much better in org 2 after committing some reagents and their purpose to memory.
 
Khan Academy has the entire sequence on video. Also, organic chemistry as a second language is a very good resource.
 
NotYou20 said:
I mostly agree, but don't completely forego memorization. I don't think I made an attempt to memorize anything in Org 1, and that was a good approach. Second semester involves a lot of reagents that have mechanisms that are either unknown or way over your head. You will not be able to "understand" why a given reagents work for a one reaction, but not a similar one. I did much better in org 2 after committing some reagents and their purpose to memory.
Click to expand...

Sure. I guess I meant don't rely strictly on memorization. If the reaction requires LDA, learn what LDA does and why it is useful in the reaction. Obviously you'll need to memorize that the correct base is LDA and not something else, but if you can recognize that a strong, sterically hindered base is needed then it almost doesn't seem like memorization.
 
Prepare for multiple anal enlargements, and learn how to draw a perfect hexagon.

But seriously, orgo is challenging for most people at most institutions. It may take up more time than multiple classes of yours combined, and it is not that similar to gen chem. Only like 11% of our class got an A (20/187 people), and the tests were always pretty tough, so don't be surprised if orgo knocks you down at some point. It is very possible to get an A, but it most likely won't come that easy (I had to work very long and hard for it).

Organic Chem as a second language is extremely helpful. Use it especially when the class gets into chair configurations. Also, do practice problems ad nauseam; the tests will most likely test your ability to think on your feet.

And a lot of molecules you'll need to draw have hexagons in them.
 
I'll concur with everyone who said to just do lots and lots of practice problems.

What saved me, both in orgo 1 and 2, was orgo as a second language and the book "pushing electrons" to get a lot of practice with the actual mechanism of reactions, what electrons go where, etc.

Besides khan and freelance teach on YouTube, I'll also add in Mastering Organic Chemistry (http://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/blog/). Lots of posts about common orgo I and II topics with diagrams and explanations. Not so much for regular study, but to get a good understanding of specific topics (Diels-Alder, Enols, etc.)

Besides that, just getting together with a study group explaining things to each other and drawing reactions on the board can be really helpful.
 
I made cheat sheets with all the reactions for a given type of molecule. So one page for Alcohol reactions, another page for Ester reactions, etc. Practice every day and memorize those reactions! If you can memorize the cheat sheets you'll be set.
 
How many of these threads will there be? The frequency of this is right up there with "I'M A FRESHMAN AND GOT A BAD GRADE SHOULD I GIVE UP ON MY DREAMS?"
 
Like everyone else said, do practice problems. I did fairly well in Orgo 1 and 2. Even though my Orgo 2 grade was still lower than I wanted it to be.

Practice Problems all day. Also UNDERSTAND THE MATERIAL, DONT JUST MEMORIZE. If you TRULY understand why certain electrons go where and WHY the mechanism is occurring in such a fashion...

you wont have to memorize as much.
 
Synthesis questions are pretty hard so concentrate on that as well. One way to prepare is to come up with a pretty weird product and then find a way to synthesize it using different reactions.
 
1) Practice problems
2) Drawing reaction mechanisms
3) Memorizing organic chemistry trends (i.e. one functional group to another: how and then why it works)

Usually I would try to generalize #3 and not worry about the exceptions.
 
Echoing what many others have said, practice problems are the #1 way to succeed in Organic Chemistry. I did almost every problem at the end of each chapter, especially the ones with solutions in a solutions manual.

Also, understanding the principles behind reaction mechanisms work (i.e. electron arrow pushing, relative thermodynamics of molecule types), rather than simply brute memorizing them, helps immensely because with the first method, you can often work your way to the right answer even if you forgot a specific mechanism.
 
Khan Academy has made a video for almost everything you could cover in organic chem 1 and 2. Highly recommend.
 
ylayla2 said:
Synthesis questions are pretty hard so concentrate on that as well. One way to prepare is to come up with a pretty weird product and then find a way to synthesize it using different reactions.
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Very true. Also Oftentimes you can work your way through a mechanism with a vague idea of what's happening, but if you're not very comfortable with reagents and what they do in a variety of situations (application!) you'll have a difficult time with such problems, especially in orgo 2. Practice makes perfect for this! 🙂

Also, if you can't see molecules in 3D, or if you can't "accept" stereo chemistry, fix this asap with a model.

Follow all the advice in this thread Op, and you'll be pretty well prepared. 🙂

Phone post
 
My Ochem professor professionally hunted Bigfoot and believed(s) he lives in the quantum dimension and that's why he has rarely been spotted- he moves through dimensions. Just some background.

I looked at the syllabus, found the breakdown of important tests vs quizzes, made up a lot of reactions, and passed. I never used ochem again. I am a PharmD grad. Biochem was much more reoccurring throughout disease states as well as application to why to choose medications and medicinal chemistry obviously through pharmacology. O chem is just a weed out course that you obviously need to do well in. If it doesn't stick beyond your finals/MCAT, don't fret. As you apply the knowledge in real circumstances (ie neutrophiles etc) it will come back because your not regurgitating it, but using and applying what you know.
 
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I haven't taken O-Chem yet (although I've been studying ahead because I'm super excited!), but I can give some advice about challenging courses in general.
1. If you find yourself slipping, even just a little, ask for help! It's your professor's job. Do not wait too long, or else you'll be taught new things on top of what you're already confused about and it will all pile up.
2. Eat healthy and make time for exercise. Mental and physical health are connected. At the very least, get enough sleep. Google search the effects of sleep deprivation; it's not a pretty picture.
3. Understand; don't memorize! You'll do better on exams. And besides, you're in college for an intellectual challenge, not to simply memorize lists.
4. It may or may not help to get a molecular modeling kit. Thanks to the torture- err, I mean, bliss- I've received from studying math, I can visualize things pretty easily. If your visualization skills aren't very good, a modeling kit could make it easier to think about bonds and isomers.
5. Enjoy the class! Chemistry truly is beautiful, and most people don't appreciate it as much as they should.
 
"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

Ochem is only intimidating, at its core it's fairly straightforward content that is shrouded in complex terminology. Once you understand that then you'll see that there's nothing to fear and you'll do fine.
 
Timeline:

tumblr_mzpy7vOV1U1qft29uo1_500.gif
tumblr_mzpy7vOV1U1qft29uo2_500.gif
tumblr_mzpy7vOV1U1qft29uo3_500.gif

Tbh.

Just start early & bite the pillow.
 
Well, it's probably curved, so...work harder and/or be smarter than your peers
 
I read Organic Chemistry as a Second Language the summer before.
During the semesters, I just did a lot of practice problems. It's just like a math class. Remember what you need to do when you see a type of problem.
 
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