<p>are you comparing competing in the Olympics with practicing medicine?</p>
<p>mini, I wish I had been able to attend your state college because in my day ALL engineering students were REQUIRED to take a chem sequence which concluded with intro ochem!!! I even have my Morrison and Boyd(2nd Edition) on my bookshelf as a bitter reminder. I escaped with a hard fought C and an abiding inability to synthesize a pink, pea sized ball of phenol in one of the labs.</p>
<p>Oh, the humanity of it!!!!</p>
<p>ah yes, good old Morrison and Boyd...I loved Bio and actually liked O-chem too, because of all the chem I took, it actually related to the inner workings of the human body, disease processes and drug mechanisms. Took O Chem at night at U of Rochester Extension and got A's. If you're really interested in the subject, you can accomplish miracles.</p>
<p>What weeded me out from the pre-med path was Thermochemistry at UCSD. Just didn't have the Math skills. Calculus and Physics of course were a real struggle too. At least I learned the hard way the importance of math skills so I can advise my daughter, who is another potential pre-med or pre-vet. Luckily her dad is a math/science whiz (engineer) and has been able to help her when needed in math classes.</p>
<p>I don't think you have to be a math whiz though to be a good doctor, but I do think you should have mastery of O Chem. Probably the gate-keeper function of many of the required pre-med classes has mostly to do with job security for physicians,as someone else pointed out above.</p>
<p>D wasn't planning on med school- she was just trying to get a plain ol bio degree- she liked Ochem, just found it much more difficult re the level of memorization.</p>
<p>I don't think it was a weed out class, anymore than any class at Reed is a weed out class, but while there were distribution requirements, so that even drama majors had to take a lab class, they didn't have for instance "rox for jox"or at Reed it used to be * Physics for Poets*, so much discussion was heard about the best science sequence for those who had difficulties with science in high school.</p>
<p>Its ironic that vet school is much more difficult to get into than med school but is lower on the status totem pole.
A vet I know says that he survived Ochem at UDavis, because the class was full of students who just stopped showing up- without apparently dropping the course so they altered the curve and he was able to pass the class.</p>
<p>C+ in OChem here, current medical student.</p>
<p>Biggest problem as far as I can tell with OChem is that across the board it is taught fairly poorly. I mean really, everywhere. I taught Kaplan MCAT prep, and the number of kids who suddenly "got" organic during their prep was amazing. I attribute much of that to the way Kaplan arranged the OChem sessions and the focus of really breaking everything down to the basics. </p>
<p>As most have stated there is a lot of memorization that typically goes on in OChem classes. And I think a lot of profs encourage that type of thinking. And even if they don't the nature of material leads students down that path rather than focusing on the method of reactions. Most students hate drawing out mechanisms, "pushing arrows" but that's where the key to actually understanding the subject lies. Part of the problem I think is due to most profs spending a majority of their research career on two to four specific reactions. They become very myopic, and tend to just focus on reactant A + reactant B = products.</p>
<p>As for the medical school comments. There is important information in ochem, concepts that will forever repeat themselves in biochem, genetics and cell biology. And when one enters medical school, the knowledge is assumed. However the bulk of what organic chemistry courses have become is useless, and perhaps the only reason Ochem is still a requirement (rather than switching over to biochem - very few schools have a biochem requirement), is because of the weeding out nature, or worse tradition. The AAMC - administrators of the MCAT - seem to think organic is becoming less and less important because they keep lowering the amount of the test dedicated to questions about it. Currently the Physical Sciences portion of the test is 50/50 physics/general chemistry, while the Biological Sciences portion is 75/25 biology/organic...</p>