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Hi Everybody, so this is the first week of classes for most of you and some of you will be on the organic chemistry bus hopefully heading towards medical school. While organic chemistry can be a scary, horrible, nightmarish experience, there are a few things one should remember:
1) Semester I is more about learning the rules of ochem. It is here that you will learn that carbon can never never have more than 4 bonds, and why electrons flow in a certain fashion. For those of you who are learners and not memorizers, this will be an important time.
2) Semester I only has several reactions that you need to learn. They are SN1, SN2, E1, E2, and some transformations with alcohols. Semester II is generally the one that all of the millions of reactions to learn.
3) Many schools use organic chemistry, and specifically Ochem I, as a way to weed students out of the pre-med program. Basically, survive sophomore year and life gets easier (i won’t go as far as to say much easier, but definitely easier).
4) If you have a prof nicknamed “Dr. Death” and “Professor Flunks-a-lot”, drop the class, wait a semester and re-enroll.
4b) If you take Organic I in the SPRING, and Organic II in the FALL, then you are out of sequence with the masses. This can sometimes make life easier for you. I did it this way, and it completely saved me becuase I got out of Professor “I usually only give Ds” class.
Keep your chin up as you head into ochem and check back here regularly for helpful hints. As always, for more organic chemistry help, please go to organic chemistry.
Good luck and happy reacting!
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Hey Everybody, here is a good trick to keep in your back pocket if you run across an EAS question where you have something in the ortho position, but not the para.
Here is a good trick to do it: First, bromonate your benzene ring under standard condition, then sulfonate using SO3/H2SO4. This will make the para bromo sulfonate. Now the next substituent, our chlorine, will be directed ortho to the bromine. We now have a trisubstituted arene ring and can remove the sulfonate unsing acidic water. This gives us a nice route to the ortho di-halide without having to justify why we got a mixture of the ortho and para products.
For more information on this, please go to organic chemistry
