<p>Hi I just wanted to know how hard being a chem major is in college and specifically how much harder it is to pull A's in courses like organic chemistry to try and maintain a high GPA for med school...</p>
<p>What is the workload like? How much more time is needed to devote to it as opposed to other majors?(non-science related) Would I be better off pick an easier major for medical school? I mean chem intrests me but not to the extent of putting myself out of contention for med school...</p>
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What is the workload like? How much more time is needed to devote to it as opposed to other majors?(non-science related) Would I be better off pick an easier major for medical school? I mean chem intrests me but not to the extent of putting myself out of contention for med school...
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<p>It doesn't really matter if you are a chem major or not, if you are premed you are still taking all of those classes... you just aren't going to be taking as many upper division courses. General rule of thumb is to pick the major that interests you the most, but chemistry is a pretty good route.</p>
<p>Actually, none of my fellow chem majors were premed. Premed people generally pick a major that requires biology and biochem (which my chem major program did not). If the chemistry major program at your university requires bio related courses then chemistry would be an appropriate pre-med major. If your major program does not have bio requirements you will have to somehow find them time to take those classes, which will be hard.</p>
<p>Premed students are a different breed of human.. super competitive point-grubbers, and because of that you may find it hard to be at the top of your class. </p>
<p>As a non-premed chem major, I really enjoyed myself. The most time consuming part of being a chem major is chem lab courses. You can count on taking 6 hrs of lab courses a week in addition to lecture courses. Lab reports are also due (weekly or biweekly), and can be time consuming and lengthy (I think my longest was 30 pages + data). </p>
<p>At my university, there was ochem classes for chem majors which was separate (and more in depth) than the ochem for premeds. Ochem isn't as bad and scary as everyone claims it is - it's mostly memorization. After I started quizzing myself with flashcards before exams I was able to pull off A's easily. You have to remember that most people that say ochem is hard don't like chemistry and would never consider majoring in it. Physical chemistry though is actually hard.. that's when they introduce quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian, perturbation theory, etc.. all involving advanced calculus (can't exactly use memorization for that!)</p>
<p>The courseload for chemistry majors is higher than that of other majors such as english. Your university should publish a course catalog book with all the different major's requirements. Just flip through that and compare. Engineering has the most, physical & biological sciences also fairly high, followed by the social sciences, language and art majors.</p>
<p>My orgo was extremely conceptual, I would've killed myself trying to memorize my way through it. I think every person in my class that didn't take time to really understand the concepts and just tried to memorize ended up dropping.</p>
<p>questions like:
(some organic compound) + (this reagent your teacher said would oxidize it) ---> (draw product)
Yes, you can memorize what the reagent does and be able to apply it to different compounds. Just being able to do that will enable you to write out reaction mechanisms, and retrosynthetic problems.</p>
<p>There are concepts you have to learn such as nomenclature, acid strength, how to push electrons (to show reaction mechanisms), how to interpret an IR or NMR spectra, etc... but all the stuff about what the reagents do you can memorize and apply.</p>
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but all the stuff about what the reagents do you can memorize and apply.
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I guess it depends on how the teacher taught. My teacher focused more on how the mechanisms for reactions work, and why they work the way they do.</p>
<p>On tests, he would give us something we'd never actually seen before, but worked in some way similar to what we had seen. There were definitely some questions where just knowing the reagent and its effects would work, but oftentimes, he'd require us to really understand everything behind a type or class of reactions. I'd say a good 30-50% of our test material was stuff that was never directly in the textbook or lecture, but if you understood the concept behind it thoroughly, could be solved.</p>
<p>hey someone said that if you are premed and major in chem you should make sure you have bio classes in it… so one college i want to go to doesn’t include bio classes in the major, but i have to minor in something anyways, so is minoring in bio and majoring in chem the same thing as having a chem major that has bio classes???</p>