<p>UMDAD,</p>
<p>Get her "Organic Chemistry for Dummies."</p>
<p><a href="http://www.chemhelper.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.chemhelper.com/</a></p>
<p>I am a first year grad student in biomedical engineering at Rice. It really helped me out as a freshman in BME at Vandy.</p>
<p>I'm a sophomore, and planning to take orgo my junior summer. I might try auditing a course beforehand though, sounds like a brilliant suggestion! </p>
<p>Question: does orgo rely heavily on proficiency in acid-base reactions? I know a professor's mentioned that some exercises involve estimating which compounds would be more acidic, but beyond that I have no idea.</p>
<p>ChrisCuber,</p>
<p>Acid/base is much more of an inorganic concept (as are lewis acids etc.)</p>
<p>You will be exposed to them, but in a much more sophisticated way.</p>
<p>I am delving deep into the memory vault here but my OChem professor constantly pounded into our little sophmore brains the concept of resonanace(?) and resonance contributors(?????). I can't say I remember much about it other that it involved electron attraction as the basis of most synthesis reactions. Did it help me get that hard earned C? Perhaps.</p>
<p>My overachiever daughter took Organic last year as a sophomore. She always has worked hard, but this was taking the concept of work to a whole new level.</p>
<p>The "best day of her life" was the day she found out she had done well enough to exempt the final in the 2nd semester. When I talked to her on the phone, she was screaming with joy. It's honestly the happiest I have ever heard her sound. I truly believe that in spite of the many good things that have come her way over the years, it really WAS the happiest day.</p>
<p>elizabeth thanks for the reminder about the dummies books
D is still in high school- but the chem course is pretty intensive& the teacher is also planning to touch on ochem so I ordered the chem for dummies book- despite the titles- they are pretty well written- the genetics book helped me a lot</p>
<p>Older sis- because she has learning disabilities- didnt take chem- bio and calc as she probably should have freshman year- - which then pushed ochem to junior year- which probably wasn't a good idea- because then her other classes were also very demanding not to mention the stress of the junior qual exam and senior year looming.
( she also didn't get her grades- I don't even know what her final GPA was because her unofficial transcript that they mailed us- just says that she passed her classes and qualified to graduate :) I think it might have been about a 3.00 averaging in the F but not counting the community college courses she took summers ( where I think she had a 4.00)</p>
<p>Curiouser- that is great- good for her.</p>
<p>Has anyone come across other schools that teach organic in the freshman year? This is a link from Juniata College: <a href="http://faculty.juniata.edu/reingold/curric.html%5B/url%5D">http://faculty.juniata.edu/reingold/curric.html</a> that explains their reasoning for doing so. It seems to make sense to me but I don't know much about it.</p>
<p>About half the MIT students who take organic take it freshman spring. (Well, about half the premeds and half the bio majors. Probably all of the chem majors.)</p>
<p>For premeds, it's a consequence of the large number of courses they need to fit in before they take the MCAT, and that many want to take the MCAT the summer after their sophomore year.</p>
<p>I'm taking a short cut and posting without reading every previous post...sorry, and please forgive me if I'm repeating a prior point.</p>
<p>IMHO, one difficulty in Organic Chemistry is the 3-dimensional nature of its subject. </p>
<p>Some of us are set up to easily imagine 3-dimensional structures and rotate and invert them in our minds. Some of us (including myself) have fits when we try to do so and have to play endlessly with models and rely on more memorization than we would have to if we could better perform that cool 3-D trick in our heads.</p>
<p>Totally unscientific observation from decades ago (no stoning, please): the males, in general, had greater facility with the Twist the Mental Three-Dimensional Image game than did the females. I am of the female persuasion.</p>
<p>(ducking any in-coming missiles)</p>
<p>UMDad,
My daughter had Calculus II from a Chinese national. She said there were kids in the class who were listening to their iPods in class while they wrote down all of the formulae that the teacher wrote on the board. They were good students and studying hard. They just couldn't use their ears in class, only their eyes.</p>
<p>I agree with the previous posters regarding the difference between Gen Chem and Organic. Gen Chem is like Physics in that it is a matter of understanding, while Organic requires intuition and extensive memorization. Our organic professor told us about a German Chemist (I think his name was Beilstein), who wanted to write down all of the known Organic Chemistry molecules and reactions. The first book was on the Alkanes, but by the time he got to the fifth book he was publishing addenda to the first book. It is simply too much for the non memorizers. I took German with some Physics majors, and they had the same problem. At some point you have to memorize the vocabulary.</p>
<p>I've never had to take it, but I was helping my Pharmacy student friends study for it last year, and I swear I was dreaming about O-Chem mechanisms and compounds!!! And I didn't even have the class!!! It's really difficult to memorize everything, and so many people were grateful for their C's in it.</p>
<p>Obviously med schools would like to see A's in OChem, how do they feel about B's?</p>
<p>From what I read online you can still get in with a B, but you more or less have to make up for that elsewhere. I think there is a med student who posts over on the premed board who got a C in ochem and still got in to med school.</p>