Questions asked at the end of Chem 261 – Summer 2011
Question 1: What advice would you share with future students of this intensive organic chemistry course?
Question 2: What do you wish you knew about this course before starting it?
Question 1: What advice would you share with future students of this intensive organic chemistry course?
- Do the exercises at the end, study with other people, utilize the web, eat breakfast.
- Read ahead and do all practice problems.
- If you like to sleep, don’t take it.
- Do not take more than one other class with the intensive and try to get as much sleep as possible.
- Get started on the study aids right away! They are helpful for the end, but would have been more helpful if I’d done them as soon as assigned.
- When taking this class, buy the BIGGER model kit. It is easier to see how the molecules move and gives a really good visual. Also, don’t get behind! Keep up with the work given.
- Study ahead of time and never get behind!
- Do the exercises and understand them after each class corresponding to the sections covered. EVERY TIME I did this, I got 30/30 on quizzes. When I didn’t, I got 24-28’s.
- Be prepared to not have a life that doesn’t include o chem. And the more you convince/believe/grow to enjoy it, the better you’ll do.
- It’s a lot of fun if you spend a lot of time understanding the material. Make sure you ask questions right away if you have any. Do as many practice problems as you can.
- Just study hard and read the activities before coming to class so they should understand what’s going on in class.
- I advise studying with a partner/group and doing the exercises from the workbook.
- Try and stay ahead, that way you won’t fall behind. Read ahead. Use weekends to your advantage!
- Learn a way to absorb everything as fast as possible. Do lots of practice problems.
- Go over reactions and mechanisms many times.
- Be prepared to spend the full three weeks only during ochem, in school and at home for many hours. Flash cards are your best friend because there is a lot of memorization.
- Understand the concepts – do not memorize! If you know the concepts then you could easily build on it but memorization allows for only so much.
- Start looking over the material BEFORE the quarter begins.
- Practice practice practice. Reactions and mechanisms! Be sure you can handle it! Takes a lot of time, energy, effort!
- Use your time wisely – read the books with all the chapters before taking this class. Study more on weekends. Do more exercises.
- Do the practice problems in the back of each activity.
- Buy the books early. Make plenty of time for studying.
- Make sure you do the exercises and at least skim through the last chem activity worksheet before coming to the quiz.
- This course is doable if you commit to being diligent out of class and complete the exercises. Then review them until you understand what is going on.
- Reaction Tree – write it over and over until memorized, then write in details like syn/anti/trans/cis/aldehyde/ketone, etc. The flow chart is worth doing once but not repeating like the tree. Also, do lab stuff in advance on weekends!
- Study every day so to not fall behind, and don’t work if possible.
- Do the prelabs prior to each week on the weekend otherwise there simply won’t be enough time to memorize anything and you will fall behind.
- Keep up with the material and study hard!
- Study hard, keep practicing over and over again. Know the concept.
- You have to study from day one because a day is like a week in a normal course.
- Study daily and never miss a class.
- Make sure it’s the only class that you are taking because it requires A LOT of extra study.
- I would like to tell them to study every day and read over the chapter before coming to class.
- Learn the reactions right away.
- Be prepared. Maybe read a little in advance. Freshen your memories about bonds, orbitals, etc. from gen chem. Don’t get behind!
- Just knowing going in that you will be focusing all your time on ochem and then it isn’t that bad.
- Study reactions a lot and understand the synthesizing problems well.
- A nice place to study.
- Review general chemistry concepts (i.e., acids and bases)
- Four hours after class studying is needed. Do prelabs one week for next week.
- Prep labs on weekends, buy book early and work in workbook, read text before class, great notes with evening reviews, ask questions over material you don’t understand immediately.
- Get plenty of sleep to pay attention in class.
- Be prepared to study a lot!
- Study like you are studying for the final EVERY DAY! Ask why, don’t just go with it.
- This is my first time taking organic chem and I absolutely love it, but I made some mistakes and I paid the price – there is time write the labs well in advance. Print the powerpoints and review them right after class – it helps. Write and rewrite and write again and again, all of the reactions.
- Make sure you draw your reaction mechanism and work all the problems in the exercises.
Question 2: What do you wish you knew about this course before starting it?
- That I need to set aside four hrs/day for pure study, and three hrs/day for lab write-ups and prelabs
- I had no idea it would be this exhausting!
- The time it REALLY took to do well in this class. The amount of time spent doing something for this class.
- How fast we would actually be covering material! Ha!
- Pre-lab structure and expectations so they could be done beforehand.
- It’s a lot of memorizing! A different style of learning from gen chem.
- I wish I knew it would take so long to drive here.
- I might have taken the later lab so I could get more sleep.
- That sleeping is an option; not required! : )
- To pack my own lunch.
- The schedule and how the class would be structured in terms of lecturing: group time ratio.
- I’m loving this class and there isn’t anything that I wish I had known first. I just wish that I could enjoy the learning and not be so concerned about trying to get the A. It is a REALLY fun class and I like the intensive atmosphere.
- I wish I knew beforehand that I had to buy a POGIL workbook and we were going to be doing the problems in groups every day.
- How much work it is! I knew it would be work but the postlab add on a lot more after a 7 hour day and having to study and do practice problems.
- I wish I knew there are so much memorization involved.
- That this course is going to be hard especially in summer! I wish I would have more knowledge on acid/base/conformational isomers beforehand.
- How to tell the difference between a strong base/weak base and how crazy hard it is for a first timer taking the class. Thanks for an amazing class! I didn’t think I could learn this much in three weeks!
- A better understanding of general chemistry.
- I wish I knew the material! But realistically I wish I knew how to study the reactions before having to learn them all at once. But they weren’t too bad!
- I wish I knew that writing out examples multiple times worked best for studying.
- Good places to study, online reference sites, etc. Not much I can think of. It was good to know ahead of time how many hours to put into the class (6 hours/day!) I actually had many nights where I put more than 6 hours in to learn everything I needed to know for the next day.
- I wish I knew this class would require so much more time to study outside of class.
- How much time it takes to do the pre/post labs every night. I would advise doing all the prelabs in the first couple of nights so that you have more time for studying as the material gets harder.
- How much time it would require outside of the classroom, and how important it is to manage your time both in and out of the classroom.
- It really requires a lot of effort and time, and workload is high!
- How it goes by so fast!
- I wish I reviewed some of my general chemistry like sp orbital stuff – it would have made things more clear at the beginning and I would have started off with a better “base” understanding.
- How tired I would be from the 7:30 a.m. labs.
- I knew it was going to be very intense so I wish I reviewed my gen chem before I started the class.
- I wish I knew the techniques that I should use to study for all the quizzes.
- I wish that somebody told me the advice that I have in the previous question!
- Name of the books. How many tests we’d have.
- Exactly how many reactions we needed to learn.
- I would have liked to know how lab would be structured (i.e., that the first quarter is lab technique based). Then I would have read on those techniques before the quarter started to be more comfortable performing them in lab for the first time.
- Some students tried to get by without the workbook. Bad idea!
- Though fast pace was expected, didn’t realize postlabs were going to be given for every lab. So time after class besides studying takes a long time.
- Everything can be on any test. Memorization of organic chem takes more repetition than typical subjects.
- This class is very hard and requires a lot of memorization.
- Mechanisms and reactions.
- It’s harder than it looks.
- I wish I had a list of all the reactions on day one because one or two days just isn’t enough time for me to memorize that stuff.
- The reactants.
- I tried to memorize everything but then I realized understanding it would be the only real way to succeed. It’s hard to catch up in this class.
- Nothing, really. I appreciated the early email saying to study six hours a day outside class and that is exactly what I did (more on weekends).
Last Updated February 21, 2022