Organic Chemistry

Parents Forum
21

<p>D took biochem and also microbio. As a bio major- she likes bio better than chem- possibly because of the math.
She actually liked Ochem- the way it put everything together- but her particular learning difference, which requires her to work twice as hard for a regular class, because her brain does not file away things into permament memory easily, made it very difficult for her, and even though she did well on the labs, participated in class, stayed after to talk to the prof- but it was a relatively small class graded on a curve & because Reed doesn't give grades, and she was apparently already on a precipice, when she did poorly on the final, she failed the class.</p>

<p>It was not an option for her to retake it at Reed ( Ochem & senior thesis?- no- likewise- losing financial aid, because of not fulltime attendance or going longer than 4 years)
She did retake it however, with her profs blessing & stayed a science major.
After she took it- she found that it isn't uncommon for students to first audit the class- and then take it again for a grade.
I think it is a tough course no matter where you go- unfortunately for my D, Reed likes to wallop you with piles of reading for freshman english, in ochem, they apparently want to make sure if you get a science degree at Reed, you can get a Ph.d ;)</p>

<p>I would not say that just because Ochem is hard- you shouldnt be a science major-. It is hard for everyone.
I have one friend who is a vet- ironically, much harder to get into vet school than med school & he says the way to take it, is at a large university where students will stop attending, without dropping the class- that way they are still counted in the curve- & you can get a passing grade :)</p>

<p>But- consider auditing the class-first</p>

<p>Oh also something my daughter did- which I would not recommend to anyone- and I was pretty upset when I found out
She did not get a book- because she thought she could share another students or use the librarys
I understand that she was trying to save money- the science books are always expensive with the color plates and all- but um honey?
How is saving $300 on a book but spending more than double that in extra school time make sense?</p>

<p>I don't know- if this is something that kids with ADD are more prone to do, but moms know, that when you live with someone you start to get a 6th sense about what is going on with them. So I think my kids, don't tell me things, because they think I already * know*/
She certainly misinterpreted that I would think not getting a text book for a killer class was a good idea.</p>

<p>We have to work harder to find out what is going on sometimes at school- and it is a fine line between interfering and supporting- but kids!
Your parents can't read your mind- certainly not when you are 800 miles away and they want you to succeed- so let them know if there is a problem- please!</p>

22

<p>Ekity-auditing the course first is a great idea, kinda like slowly wading into the water to slowly acclimate yourself rather than diving right in with the uncomfortable shock of the cold water.</p>

<p>Why didn't I think of that way back when.</p>

23

<p>This is a really enlightening thread. My daughter is taking it now and described it to me as like learning a new language. She is working very, very hard but enjoying it thus far.</p>

<p>Oddly enough, at Columbia she feels that Bio is a "weeder" course. </p>

<p>Funny about the auditing comment - I was on a walk the other day with a friend currently getting a graduate degree at Villanova. She told me that there were some Duke kids at Villanova this past summer auditing orgo. My daughter had never heard of that before.....perhaps because it is a pretty expensive way to prep for a course.</p>

24

<p>DISCLAIMER: I have a master's in organic chemistry and have been a practicing medicinal chemist for over 20 years. Virtually without exception, people who find out what I do say "ooh! I hated organic chemistry in college!"</p>

<p>I think what makes organic seem so hard in college is partially the way it's taught - lots of memorization and pages of name reactions to absorb - and partially because it IS hard. (Oh, and I agree - it's often the weed-out course for the premeds. If I had a nickel for every kid who complained to me in my TA days that "he needed this A to get into med school..") Once you understand the basic concepts behind the memorization, it's not so bad.</p>

<p>The thing I always loved about organc chemistry is that it's so hand's-on. You mix the stuff together, stir it, heat it, wait a while, and voila - aspirin. At least on the undergrad level, you are pretty much guaranteed that if you follow the directions, you'll be successful, and it can even get pretty exciting along the way (lab fires, anyone?) It's kind of like baking a cake with the remote possibility that the cake will explode.</p>

<p>Two things I have noticed after working with (organic) chemists for so long - most of them like to cook, and almost all of them had an old-fashioned chemistry set as a kid, even before they "knew" they wanted to study chemistry.</p>

25

<p>I second the notion that registering for Organic Chemistry during the summer session is a good idea.</p>

26

<p>Here is an exaggeration but perhaps those parents who were not science major may appreciate the analogy. </p>

<p>It is the peculiar requirement of med school that makes organic chemistry courses a miserable experience for so many. Could you imagine what would happen to courses like "Skespearean Characters in Novels" or "Renaissance Arts in Tuscany" if they serve as mandatory weeder courses for med school admission? Think of the misery of having to know every minor character in Shakespeare's plays without learning the context and when you are niether interested in Elizabethan theater nor fiction in general. </p>

<p>On the other hand for students who are interested in the subject, learning and looking for Shakespearean characters in unexpected places may take little effort. Likewise, the delights of minutiae in Tuscany painters and sculptors may be easy for only a few.</p>

<p>Disclaimer: I am a chemist/biochemist and a prof</p>

27

<p>Scout59, that's exactly how I felt about organic! Maybe I should have become an organic chemist instead of a doc. I went into pathology because i never got over my love of messing around in the lab. But I love to cook, especially baking which is the most like undergrad organic</p>

<p>What people/kids don't understand, is how many parallels there are between the type of learning in organic and then in med school - you have to absorb and process vast amounts of information rapidly, then organize and apply that knowledge in a process of deductive reasoning - making a diagnosis. Now this type of intellectual work doesn't always correlate with how good a doctor you are - but I think it does correlate with success in med school, and you have to get through that first to become a doctor. As someone once said on the med school forum, in contrast to law where there are many law schools of varying caliber, and the gatekeeping for practice is the Bar Exam; in medicine, med schools are more similar in their standards, so once you get admitted, you are pretty much assured of becoming an MD - the gatekeeping is on the admissions end.</p>

28

<p>cangel writes "What people/kids don't understand, is how many parallels there are between the type of learning in organic and then in med school". </p>

<p>Actually I think most people do understand the link. To me, big struggles in o-chem told me that med school might not be my best option ;) And the grapevine had it that med schools weighed the grade in o-chem heavily in admissions, so even a stellar GPA wouldn't overcome a B- or C in o-chem.</p>

29

<p>D is not planning on going into medicine of anytype although she does like genetics
Her school has distribution reqs and I beleive that all students need 2 consecutive science courses with labs to graduate-
Since it is * Reed*, they don't have courses like rocks for jocks or even physics for lit majors. ( although they apparently did in the past- their version anyway)</p>

<p>There is much discussion about what the most accessible lab classes are, for those who are taking them because they have to.
All students know that they are in for a lot of writing when they come to Reed, so those requirements dont' seem to be as much of a bear for students, but the requirements for students who didn't excel in the sciences in high school, can be difficult to meet, because a music major is taking the Chem or Bio class, alongside chem and bio majors, so the bar seems to be higher and the pace may be faster.</p>

<p>D had a pretty good science background in high school, one of the perks of having ties with both Fred Hutch and the UW,which probably contributed to deciding to be a bio major, instead of art, but she still found the intro classes pretty challenging.</p>

<p>I admit I barely took bio in high school- and it was pretty rudimentary- I never took chem- or physics so it is possible that part of Ds problem was that we didn't have sufficent background to give her support in school.</p>

<p>So DMD- since you do have a science background- but I think your D was majoring in drama at Reed, is she having any problems with the science courses?</p>

<p>But to go back to OChem- yes everyone interested in any sort of medicine has to take it.
When D moved back to Seattle to * retake* it, she wasn't able to take it at the UW even though they had like 25-30 sections, because they were all full of people who had to take Ochem for their program.</p>

<p>She ended up taking it at a community college- ( I suggested to her that she just take the whole year over, even though she had passed fall sem), and there were students in her classes who already had degrees, but they were changing their focus and needed to take/retake it, she was glad to see it wasn't just kids right out of high school.( although apparently in one of her classes she * did* have a running start student- who liked to rub it in that they were only 16. )</p>

<p>There were also UW students who couldn't get into a section on campus, but needed to take it to stay on track for graduation- I saw that a lot when I worked as an advisor there.</p>

<p>I realize that it may seem expensive to audit a class and then take it
BUt if you need a decent GPA for med school- it could save you money in the long run.
If you are really interested in sciences, but need more time to process really difficult stuff, it may give you enough time to do that & still keep your sanity.
While my daughter taking a year off and then going back did eventually work out- she did graduate- but going through failing a class, being away from her college for a year- and then going back could have been prevented by auditing the class before hand, I think I would have suggested it.
It does seem to be that difficult.</p>

30

<p>I loved Organic Chemistry in school as well as college. I was an engineering major and must have taken just 1 course in college or maybe 2, don't remember. I don't know what the fuss is with Organic chem. What I remember is, in India, we studied all subjects of Science, Physics, Chemistry and Biology all 4 years of high school. Even if some of it was repetitious, I think this allowed normal kids like me (not a genius IQ but bright) to understand and assimiliate the subjects well. I sometimes think I should have been an organic chemist instead of a software person. Once you get it, there is a whole lot you can do with Chemistry in general and Organic in particular and is an avenue for a lot of creativity. Ah well....some other time, maybe.</p>

31

<p>And I agree with newmassdad, that it is not fact-driven, there are concepts and once you get them, you can master Organic Chem...</p>

32

<p>Newmassdad: I was a biochem major at MIT when molecular biology was pretty much all they taught. Thus, organic chem was essential. In fact, I did not study any organismal biology until many years later.</p>

<p>EK4: my daughter quite reluctantly took chemistry, which she passed. Since she has never collected her grades, I don't know how well she did in it. The final lab--qualitative chemistry and identification of unknowns--took several days of brainstorming and struggle. But she passed. It was a challenge for her, indeed.</p>

33

<p>dmd, molecular is still pretty much all they teach at MIT. :D</p>

<p>I found organic difficult because there was a certain art to it -- some students seemed to be able to intuitively see what the product of chemical A + chemical B was, but I couldn't. It was pretty frustrating.</p>

34

<p>When I was a nurse deciding whether or not to go to med school, I decided to take an organic chem class at UNC-CH--to see how I liked it--I'm not sure how many weeks I lasted but I DIDN'T like it. Eventually got Ph.D. in Psch. instead; made much more sense to my brain.</p>

35

<p>D is junior chem major at Carleton. Memorization wasn't her difficulty in O-chem - it was the intuitively spatial nature that drove her to frustration (not her strong point). She made it through a tough 20 weeks covering a year's worth of O-chem. Carleton teaches a semester's worth of material in 10 weeks. She's now being tortured by Quantum Chem and next term, Thermal Chem. Thank goodness she is following a passion. When she graduates, it will have been like giving birth. The memory of the pain fades, and you go ahead and do it again.</p>

36

<p>achat and newmassdad: while I do agree with both of you that there are fundamental concepts to organic chemistry that ease understanding, I think the memorization and structural issues that mollieb mentions must come first. Perhaps a more conceptual learner could do it the other way around, but I think that's less common.</p>

37

<p>It's basically a lot of memorization of reaction mechanisms and periodic trends, pushing arrows, being able to visualize a molecule, determining the structure of a molecule from looking at graphs, and synthesizing a product from a reactant. I used the Loudon textbook with the study guide, each of which had about 1300 pages.</p>

38

<p>WOW!
I had no idea that OChem was such a hot button topic with anyone but me - 3 pages just today.... everyone either suffered or thrived!
I suffered. My Phi Beta Kappa certificate is proudly framed but the D in organic is what I remember most. Horrible teachiing helped to weed out most of the pre-meds. Despite what some here claim, love of baking and following directions did not help. It was brutal memory work filtered through TA's who's TOEFL must have been near the rock bottom.... Switched to another science major and sailed through. Another generation later, DD got her lowest grade ever (although lowest is very relative for her) in OChem last semester. Perhaps next year's national high school "prayer rally at the flagpole" should include prayers for better college instruction....I'm convinced that's what is dividing our kids in science and engineering from those in other countries - bad undergrad teaching in the courses that matter most.</p>

39

<p>Teaching makes all the difference to me. I ended up with a professor who was far more interested in being a provost and his research than helping us understand orgo. Despite going in to see him at least once a week outside of class, he didn't really help me out at all with my final grade (I thought he might bump me up a little bit, because I was showing interest in the class, etc., but apparently not). There's another teacher that's notoriously easy, but I of course was not lucky enough to get into her class. I got to hear all my friends boast how the average on her first test was a 94, though.</p>

<p>Plus, I have a horrible time visualizing things in my head. I have to build the molecules with the organic model kit to see what they look like and how they react. </p>

<p>I didn't end up failing, but I didn't do well at all...I'm going to retake it next semester. Plus, I'm not premed anymore - I'm just going to try for PA school instead (and I'm hoping that a retake isn't going to hurt me too much for that).</p>

40

<p>Some people have mentioned it, but as a former Kaplan MCAT teacher, I can attest that most of the problems people have are due to not looking at the underlying principles of reactions and instead focusing on the window dressings...</p>

<p>For example, every reaction has an electrophile and a nucleophile and based on finding the most stable (least energetic) product...but it's not taught in those basic, basic terms and then built upon, you learn specific mechanisms such as concerted Nucleophilic substitution or elimination mechanimsms.</p>

<p>My organic professor would always show us a new reaction and say "well tha'ts pretty easy now isn't...so how will I blow your minds on the test? I'll put it upside down and backwards!!!" (he always yelled the entire time). And he literally did do just that and people would miss it. Because they would focus so much on the structural representation rather than the qualities actually important for why the reaction proceeded as it did. It's really one of the first science classes in which you have to focus on understanding the reasoning of why things happen rather than simply how they happen.</p>