How To Get An A In Organic Chemistry

The author suggests that we need "future doctors who are less Spock and more Kirk". I ask: "What about Bones?" In addition to actually being a doctor, McCoy has conscience, dedication, loyalty to his patients, and technical skill.

Of course, that's "actually being a doctor" in the sense of being a fictional character who was written as a doctor. You can ask too much of a facile comparison.

I took orgo as an undergrad from a brutal professor. His name is Marcus Tius, and he is legendary at UH Manoa for being hard. He got his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at Harvard from EJ Corey. Most people on here probably don't know who EJ Corey is, but he's widely considered to be the greatest chemist alive. And Corey's lab is insanely intense. A few of his grad students committed suicide in recent years from the pressure. Supposedly, I don't know if this is urban legend, but EJ Corey told several others that Tius was his best student ever at the time.

Anyways, I just wanted to share a few of my orgo stories. Our first exam mean scores were in the 20%'s. Only 10 of us got above 70%. There is NO curve in his class. He talked about this after the first exam, and he said, "Many of you are asking me if there's a curve. I wouldn't hesitate to call 90% and above an A." The first test was so brutal, that after he called the 15 minute left mark, a whole sea of "HOly shit! WTF?!" spread throughout the lecture hall. It was shortly after that, one of the students was escorted out by a grad student proctor because he peed his pants. I was already light headed from the intensity of the exam, but seeing a guy literally pee in his pants almost made me pass out.

In retrospect, orgo isn't that bad. If I had taken it the previous year with another professor who was using the McMurry textbook, I would have even said it was pretty easy. But, no. I was stuck with Tius, and I was stuck with an entry level graduate textbook on organic chemistry--this part is no joke. However, in retrospect, I also realized Tius wasn't bad either. I realized that if I just worked on his assigned problem sets and studied those for the exams, I would have done fine. The exam mostly consisted of the problem set. So, he was very fair. However, all of the urban legend stories made me so scared, I was doing all the problems in the chapter which often took 50-60 hrs a week to complete.

For anyone thinking about taking orgo, it's really not that bad. However, like any other course, the professor and books can make it incredibly hard. Just be wary of that.

BTW, I did get an A in both orgo courses. I majored in math and chemistry, and I have to say, that class with Tius was by FAR the hardest shit I ever had to go through. And that includes a general chemistry course with another brutally hard chem professor in which I stood up three nights in a row to study for the third exam because I was so behind. I got an A in that class too.

It seems necessary to make exams that hard when they do not determine the grade anyway (the OP got an A- with a B on the final exam).

Let me expand on how it works in a German university. There are no curves, the concept is completely foreign here. Your grade is 100% determined by a final exam. You do exercises only to get approval for writing the final exam in the first place.

It sounds like your exams are more like Microsoft Certifications rather than US university exams. At top US universities, it is common to include questions that only one person in 100, or zero in 100 will get right. I took plenty of Math exams with 10 questions, where getting 5 would earn an A, and 8 is how many grad students would get right, and the 10th question was a joke, like Fermat's Last Theorem. The exams were not to demonstrate you are certified in a subject, but rather to show your ability and limits.

Not grading on a curve is a horrible idea. It means the exam must be limited to material that is taught, rather than limiting it to known knowledge in the universe. German University sounds like a big ass certification program, not a real university.

Not grading on a curve is a horrible idea.

Maybe I misunderstand what this curve grading is all about, but doesn't grading on a curve mean the grade is not a measure of how good one is, but how one compares to other people who happened to be taking the exam at the same time? So you don't have to be any good to get a top grade - just better than other people taking the exam at the same time? And likewise, you could be the world's tenth greatest living chemist, but if the other nine people taking the exam are the world's top nine, you'll fail.

And not doing this is "a horrible idea"?

This is a complex issue. Harvard grades everyone on a curve, and basically never gives lower than a B. They use "A+" as a system to identify the truly exceptional people.

My point is that a professor should be able to write 20 questions that are relevant and interesting, and just look at the distribution of results to assign grades. I think that makes sense, rather than turning university exams into certification style exams.

My answer to why, it is a horrible idea to not grade on a curve requires and anecdote:

I took an impossibly hard math course with about 15 students where the average grade was a 2, I got a 4, one guy got a 6, and another guy got an 8. The professor gave me an A, but in reality, I was 4 orders of magnitude dumber than the best student. Professors have discretion. The main reason I tell this story, is that the guys that got a 6/10 and and 8/10 have both gone on to have an 8-figure net-worth (fuck-you money). One through finance, and another through a startup. It has been awesome to see the people that I know are insanely smart become insanely wealthy.

The important part of this anecdote is that the professors that wrote the exam wrote two questions that one of smartest humans on earth could not answer. How fucked up would the world be if the professor had only written the 4 questions we all got it right? Asking impossible questions creates greatness. Grading on a curve enables professors to find truly exceptional people.

What you've written here doesn't make much sense; possibly because the reason you wrote it wasn't to support your argument but to tell us you went to school with some people who became very rich.

"How fucked up would the world be if the professor had only written the 4 questions we all got it right?"

This just doesn't make sense. What are you trying to say? Did you mean to ask "What happens if there were only four questions and we all got it right?"

"My point is that a professor should be able to write 20 questions that are relevant and interesting, and just look at the distribution of results to assign grades."

Fine. My point is that this means you're being marked on the basis of how well you did compared to everyone else who took the exam, which means it's not a measure of how good you are; it's a measure of how good you are compared to the others taking the exam. If the purpose of taking the exam is to demonstrate you know the material, grading on a curve subverts and corrupts that purpose. Any exam in which your mark depends on how well other people do in the exam is a nonsense; your mark should only depend on how well you do in the exam. If the professor knows the exam is horrifically difficult and thinks that to score twenty percent is amazing, you should get a good mark for reaching twenty percent, even if everyone else scores fifty percent.

Grading on a curve helps normalize the resulting letter grades based on how well everyone else in the class understand the material, as it was presented. You are correct in this.

I believe it acts as a check to make sure that the class is well taught, and the questions of an appropriate difficulty level.

If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade.

Makes good sense to me. The problems arise in the Harvard situation, where nobody is curved down. If you down curve inflated scores downward, then a curve only serves to inflate grades and is less useful.

"If every student receives an F for a 40% correct (and they all only get 40% correct), a curve normalizes that. Students who understand the material as it was presented and tested better than others receive a higher grade."

If every one in the class was lazy to study/prepare for the exam and every one ended up getting less than 40% correct, then they all deserve to get F. Normalizing with a curve means, it's possible that someone who got only 39% in that exam in a class full of lazy folks who all scored much less than him, can earn a A or A+ ! Compare this to similar class/exam taken by different set of students (all brilliant) at a different time or place, who all worked hard and scored above 80% but still some of them could get B or C's due to curve grading. Wouldn't it be unfair to the 80% scorer who got a C whereas some one who scored a 39% on the same subject got A+ due to circumstances (time and peers he took the exam with) !! How is that fair at all?

This is an invented objection. In reality, in classes of sufficient size, there is always a subset of students who work hard (or are extra smart, or whatever), a subset who is average, and a subset who slacks, or just doesn't understand the material well. The objection that there might be a mass class conspiracy to all score 40%, or that everyone in the class will be lazy, just doesn't make sense.

Who says it's a conspiracy? It's more a matter of culture. I have seen it happen: there's a trend in the class where the homework grades, on average, are high, but the exam grades are low, even though the material is mostly the same. This happens at reputable schools and at "low tier" schools.

It's quite difficult to write new tests that are unique enough not to be trivialized by access to old exams but of consistent difficulty semester after semester. Even if you could it might not give the result you want: if your university moves upmarket or the high school preparation in your subject improves should the average grade in your class increase to reflect these exogenous factors?

It's hard enough writing a good exam -- maximally descriminating, useful pedagogically, not unintentionally ambiguous -- without also requiring it to be mechanistically translatable to a semester grade.

"If the purpose of taking the exam is to demonstrate you know the material"

Well, the parent doesn't actually agree that that's the point of the exam:

"The exams were not to demonstrate you are certified in a subject, but rather to show your ability and limits."

But yeah, I think jcampbell1 is exaggerating and a little too proud.

Rampant grade inflation at Harvard and other Ivy leagues does not make grading on a curve a good idea. What does grading on a curve even mean if everyone is getting B's and higher anyway? If the class cannot grasp the material at hand, they should be graded poorly. If they learn it well, they should be rewarded. It is perfectly fine to write difficult (even near impossible) questions on an exam, with or without a curve. The only classes where I saw a grading curve used effectively were the weeder classes at <my well known research university> for high-demand majors. Like ochem for pre-med and electrical engineering prereqs, there were not enough spots in the program for everyone, and a certain percentage would fail the class, therefore assuring that only the strongest students would be admitted to those high priority majors.

> Asking impossible questions creates greatness.

Disagree. Asking the question didn't create the greatness. It was there to begin with.

Just add a bonus question, what's wrong with that? People who don't give a shit can ignore it. Those who truly care will solve it because it's there.

We have a fetish for measuring and ordering people. Imagine what would happen if that professor couldn't "find" that one person who scored an 8. We would never be able to find brilliant thinkers.

Thank you Harvard.

I don't know how you would arrive at that conclusion from the information I've provided.

Exams are not at all restricted to the material taught; usually, knowing all the covered material and being able to reproduce it will only get you as far as 50%, allowing you to pass. Points above that will come from novel applications of the material you learned, or tests on the general concepts and approaches you should have learned.

Everything is fair game at top US universities.

>novel applications of the material you learned

>tests on the general concepts and approaches you should have learned.

The difference is that top US universities will ask questions that there is no reason you should possibly know the answer, and questions that only a person obsessed with the subject matter would possibly know. Grading on a curve allows the professors to ask really hard questions. Both knowledgeable students and exceptional students get the same grade, but the exceptional students get recommendations.

You probably think the US is very unfair. It is.

In the US, it is common that half the class gets a 50%, 10 people get a 70%, and one person gets a 90%. That one person is not lumped in with the rest. She is tracked to win a future Nobel prize.

Top US university exams are not the same as Microsoft certifications.

In the US, it is common that half the class gets a 50%, 10 people get a 70%, and one person gets a 90%.

And that is precisely the same in Germany; I've seen my share of exams where anything above 70% was the equivalent to an A, because nobody could realistically be expected to get 90%, let alone 100%; with questions where "there is no reason you should possibly know the answer, and questions that only a person obsessed with the subject matter would possibly know". I've seen courses where four out of five students failed the exam.

I have absolutely no idea where you get the idea that it's like a Microsoft certification. The difference in Germany is that if nobody gets an A, then nobody gets an A, period [1]. If everybody fails the course, then, well, everybody fails the course.

Part of the reason is that German universities traditionally have had pretty open admission policies; which meant that there never was much room for a C for effort. Grades had to mean something, namely that the student was deserving of a degree. And that meant that students had to be graded relative to the degree requirements, not relative to the rest of the class. And they ask really hard questions so that they can differentiate between the good and the brilliant.

For what it's worth, I've taken graduate math courses both in Germany and in the US; I think I have a pretty good idea what it's like in either country.

[1] Actually, Germany doesn't have an alphabetic system for grades, but you get the idea.

> It means the exam must be limited to material that is taught, rather than limiting it to known knowledge in the universe.

To turn that around, grading on a curve means that the test can have nothing to do with the material taught in the course--and so cannot be used paired with a pre-test to calculate the effectiveness of the course (and of the professor) in teaching the material. (Not that such things are even measured in Universities, especially for tenured professors...)

German University sounds like a big ass certification program, not a real university.

Degrees in Germany were traditionally research degrees (this may have changed when they introduced the Bachelor), and this explains why exams are done the way they are done.

The thesis at the end is substantial (a Diplom or Magister thesis was a year of genuine research), you would hand it in, they would examine you, and if you passed you would be admitted to the club. That's what German universities are, exclusive clubs.

Of course, before you can go and start writing, there are all sorts of prerequisites to be fulfilled. There is sufficient interaction between the students and faculty to spot the geniuses, the good and average students, and the hopeless cases. The hopeless ones would be failed out within the first two years.

I think you might misunderstand. Typically there are at least a midterm and a final exam, and sometimes homework counted into the grade. So, depending on the respective weighting of each exam and the homework, a B on the final with an A- in the class is entirely plausible.

I used to work at a biotech startup (late '90s) and our senior management was trying to get Corey to join our scientific advisory board.

Eventually, he agreed and our company drafted a press release (it was a big coup for us). Apparently, the initial draft that was sent to Corey said something like, "Dr. Corey's lab is one of the premier laboratories in the world for organic synthesis...." The revision that Corey sent back crossed out the words "one of".

I was an organic chemistry TA for a professor who was notorious for having the hardest organic chemistry class at our school, but it was also widely considered that surviving his course meant that you truly understood the subject matter.

He was unapologetic about the subject matter being difficult and believed that teachers who didn't teach it hard and try to really force undergrads to understand it were cheating themselves.

He was especially adamant about it because many undergrads taking organic are trying to go to medical school and didn't like the idea of letting lazy or stupid people become doctors on his watch.

When we were grading tests, he would laugh as he marked errors and delivered low grades. "Hexavalent carbon? WRONG. Saving lives... Saving lives..."

Orgo is a double edged sword. The flow of electron density that dictates bonding patterns between the machinery of life is fascinating and graspable intuitively. The problem comes when you get to those useless professors who prefer not the theoretical but the practical applications of industrial synthesis, who enjoy shoving heaps of reactions with various reagent combinations down their students' throats. As a result it becomes impossible to think mechanistically as I believe a good organic chemist should, and instead studying is reduced to carrying around stacks of note cards and memorizing different chemicals, solvents, and temperatures. That's hell, because it's stupid and a waste of time.

This is true. Some of the reason that American students in particular have a hard time in organic chemistry is the insistence of teaching intro orgo by functional group rather than reaction mechanism. In the UK, it's far more common to organize a course around mechanisms (which is how most graduate and advanced orgo is taught).

The functional group approach exposes you early and often to seemingly non-sensical (or at least challenging) exceptions that don't seem to follow any pattern, all of which makes perfect sense when you learn them grouped with other situations where the same mechanism applies.

well, no, because you do need that working knowledge. Don't know what DAST is? Then you'll never come up with using it in a reaction. You won't have saved the company a load of money on a route to med-chem up a compound.

FWIW, the OP is a professional science writer...that is, she's written books about scientific topics and has also produced for scientific-themed shows like NOVA. Her undergrad was in American Studies.

I'm pointing this out to give her more credit for making the career change (at 42) to become a doctor. It'd be different if she were an engineer who became a science journalist and then later decided to become a doctor...This is assuming that if you didn't do something like o-chem as an undergrad (many engineers do o-chem or an equivalent hard science topic to graduate), doing it at 42 is quite the brave shift.

I think one of the quotes in the article resumes it perfectly : "Sometimes, if a student has really good math skills, they can slide through physics, but you can't do that in orgo". If they would concentrate a little bit more on physics and math, they'd get to realize the "exceptions" based on cold, acid, etc... can be explained instead of just memorized.

Although I advocate for chemists to know more physics, what you are saying is not true. There are exceptions that can be rationalized based on general principles of physics, detailed understanding of physics is not necessary. The relationship between physics and math is not the same as the relationship between chemistry and physics. Much of mathematics (especially college-level calculus, versus say, college theoretical algebra) were explicitly created with physics in mind. So with an encyclopedic knowledge of calculus transformations, a semi-educated guess at the appropriate transformation is possible. You're even better off if you understand dimensional analysis.

This is not true for chemistry. Even chemists disagree vehemently on why, for example alkanes are staggered in the lowest energy conformation. Is it because the electrical charges in the hydrogen electron orbital clouds have a weak repulsive effect? Or is it because the hydrogen electron density can partially donate into the sigma antibonding orbital and stabilize the conformation at the expense of a little bit of bond stability?

There are two points regarding the relevance of organic chemistry to future doctors that the article could expand on further.

1. Organic chemistry is often the first class that a prospective future doctor takes that requires you to develop proper study habits. One can get away with most other introductory level courses in the sciences by cramming during the day or two before the exam. Organic chemistry is different--it requires structured and daily studying. This is an essential skill for anyone planning to go to medical school.

2. Organic chemistry teaches you to thing and reason about objects in three-dimensional space. Stereochemistry (roughly: if something is right handed or left handed) is an essential idea in organic chemistry. Being able to think about objects in 3D space is a very useful ability (and necessary) for a future doctor.

> Medical schools are tweaking admission protocols, looking beyond an A in orgo for future doctors who are less Spock and more Kirk. > I asked two medical school deans — Dr. Robert Witzburg at Boston University and Dr. Lee Goldman at Columbia University — about admission philosophies. Both are proponents of holistic review, the newish idea that medical schools look beyond grades and test scores to evaluate the whole applicant

You should always read this as code for "to reduce the number of Asian students admitted".

Not always. In the past holistic review was to keep Jews out of the Ivy League. The minority being targeted will probably be different 50 years from now.

That said, I do agree that soft skills are probably valuable for doctors.

My data structures course in which I made a B- was much harder than Organic I and II which I made A+'s by never getting any question wrong on any exam. I never figured out why that was and have wondered why I saw one harder than the other. Maybe if labs were not so boring or monotonous Id of been a chemist or maybe programming is much harder.

I can't say you're objectively wrong, but my experience differs dramatically.

I am a really lousy cook. I am not handy; I'm fairly certain my relatives laugh at me behind my back. And I did high school chemistry lots of years earlier. In short, a background which promise pain when studying organic chemistry.

I was so stressed in the lab, that when a small fire started between me and the exit (a student used a poor way of evaporating she'd learned in a previous course), I just thought "Ah, the fire extinguisher is by the exit with the other students, someone else can stop the fire, I'm too busy.". Luckily, someone did. (This fire was a minor scandal; could have really damaged the accident statistics.)

That said, the organic chemistry and lab work was incredibly fun and giving. It really surprised me that I loved the subject.

You needed protective covering, built interesting stuff, used vacuum to evaporate, boiled stuff in oil baths to get much higher than water temperature. You could read the "things I won't work with" blog ( http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with... ) and shudder at the FOOF formula.

Much more fun than biochemistry lab. Much more fun than sitting on a chair in front of a screen.

If I hadn't been sick (unknown food allergies and bacteria infection in a tooth, both of which made me tired), I might be a chemist today. I got through the course but had to quit later.

Edit: I might add -- my present back problems from sitting in front of a screen for decades might force me to an unpleasant/dangerous operation in ten years.

Edit 2: Half the reason I liked Org Chem was probably that the subject had to do with reality, it was such fun after just studying/working with totally abstract concepts my whole life.

Completely agree. Created an account just to say that the lab work (for orgo 1) was the single most fun, fulfilling class I took in college. It's probably why I like to cook very much.

I took Introduction to Organic Chemistry part 1 on Coursera. (And passed it.)

It was the worst executed Coursera class I have taken. The lectures contained only the bare bones of the theory and almost no examples, and there was lots of difficult homework (of the sort the NYT article describes). Even if they would want us to have no theoretical foundation, and just generalize from examples (like the NYT article suggests), they should have told us that that is the M.O. of the course, and then actually give us a large number of examples to stare at.

Of course intro level organic chemistry is no secret knowledge, and there are good textbooks, but what's the point of an online course (or real university course lectures), if just reading a proper textbook would be more beneficial.

Any subject can be transformed into a difficult course by teaching too little theory, and then giving too advanced homework.

I took a night class in organic chemistry at 30, considering a career change that I never pursued. It was fantastically challenging, which was what I needed at the time (I wasn't getting enough from my job). After the experience, I completely understand why this class serves as a proxy for medical school admissibility. For someone who almost never studied, I suddenly found myself doing an hour or two of homework each night. Going back to school and getting the 'A' from a top 10 university was one of my proudest academic achievements. I highly recommend taking a few classes out of your comfort zone to recharge your batteries.

> "It seems a lot like diagnosis," said Logan McCarty, Harvard's director of physical sciences education, who taught the second semester. >"That cognitive skill — inductive generalization from specific cases to something you've never seen before — that's something you learn in orgo."

I wonder why people can get away with saying stuff like this without evidence. I'd be inclined to think that the diagnosis boosting from orgo is minor at best and the time used would be far better spent actually learning to make diagnoses.

His argument "Sounds like Organic Chemistry doesn't it?" is exactly what I am criticising. Sounding similar, doesn't mean there will be strong synergy effects.

I give that there could be some synergy effects, but I highly doubt there are strong enough that it's better to study orgo rather than what is actually being applied.

> But the rules have many, many exceptions, which students find maddening. The same molecule will behave differently in acid or base, in dark or sunlight, in heat or cold, or if you sprinkle magic orgo dust on it and turn around three times. You can't memorize all the possible answers — you have to rely on intuition, generalizing from specific examples. This skill, far more than the details of every reaction, may actually be useful for medicine.

Ignoring the specifics about Organic Chemistry, this skill, relying on intuition and generalizing from specific examples, is the skill of Pattern Recognition.

Regardless of the subject, you can't memorize all of the possible permutations and combinations, but you can start to get a feel for the patterns and begin to recognize them. Then when you encounter something new, you can recognize the pattern, or enough of the pattern to have a place to start.

Think about things you do on a day-to-day basis and how you react to a new situation. You just signed up for a new service and you get your first bill in the mail - you've never seen this bill, but it fits the pattern of every other service you use and you already know how to pay it. Now apply that same concept to something more complex than paying a bill.

I'd love to see a course like this in every field of study since pattern recognition is a skill that everyone has but so few seem to do really well.

Pretty neat article!

My girlfriend is a bio major and we have talked for hours about the pain and crushing defeat that org-chem can bring. I always likened it to calculus for me, since math has always been my weak point, but I never had a calculus exam that made me feel the way org-chem seems to make some students feel.

Also major respect to the author. Making that kind of career change in your 40's has to be difficult. I wish her the best of luck.

Orgo is, in many ways, like learning a foreign language, in that the memorization early on is supposed to support and later be superseded by understanding the "grammar" of how things fit together. I think the way orgo is often taught, or perceived, as being just about memorization is what can make it soul-crushing and not all that effective.

The introductory orgo classes I took early in college were heavy on reaction mechanisms, molecular orbital theory, and intuition and light on memorizing bucket-loads of reactions, and it ended up giving me and my classmates a much better grasp of the material than students from other schools. Many of us ended up breezing through our university's graduate courses in organic chemistry while graduate students from other universities struggled painfully through the same courses. I suspect that it's part of the reason it was the top organic chemistry program in the world.

I took grad-level orgo. It was a firehouse of knowledge. One of my professors was Phil Baran, who just got the MacArthur award (for his work in orgo)... Literally got hit by a car the day before the final, (went to the ER and everything, but no broken bones); came hobbling in to the exam. First time I ever failed a class in my life, but I came back the next year, and passed. I'm so glad I did it; though I don't actively use organic chemistry in my day-to-day I can go to conferences with organic chemistry and understand 90% of what they are saying.

Our orgo textbook must have been 4 inches thick. I can still remember in the first lecture, when the professor said, "your homework is to do all the problems in the book." All of them. Luckily I had an easy semester otherwise, so I sat in the library, and did untold pages of problems.

That said, p-chem (physical chemistry) was a lot harder ;-).

I'm in a PhD program for chemistry, learned calculus when I was 25, and I thought PChem was pretty intuitive.

I suppose it depends on the professors you have. I had an excellent orgo professor, and a rather bad p-chem professor.

He was the hardest grader of any professor I ever had. He gave (partial) negative points for an incorrect answer on tests. I had friends who ended up with negative scores on their tests. The class average score was in the 30% range. I had one friend who managed to get every single question wrong on a 20 question true false section, which to this day still amazes me. Luckily it was on a curve, or he would have failed us all.

Eventually, I gave up trying to understand p-chem, and concentrated on just learning his very strange test style. That turned out to be a fantastic decision for my grade. I got the high score in the class on the last test and the final, which got my grade up from a B- to an A-. The downside was I never really learned p-chem ;-).

Hard-ass instructors aren't confined to orgo.

I had a professor in calculus. His tests were multiple-choice, with 1.0 for correct and -0.25 for every wrong answer. So even if you answered _nothing_, you would get a 0.

The average in his exams used to be -1.5 or so. You made an "A" if you got > 2.5 out of 15.0

That is the point! People were just too proud to leave the test blank; they thought they knew the material. But the wily old fox would trick them, and very few saw through this tricks.

This just goes to show you that personal interest goes a long way for these difficult subjects. I always found org chem fascinating and eventually got my PhD in it. I always found it very intuitive and not that challenging.

However stuff like advanced mathematics is completely beyong my comprehension.

1. We need more medical schools. 2. Free medical schools completely funded by the government. 3. We need to weed out the students who want to make money off their patients, or future Dr. Ego's. 4. Reading this reminded me of college, and it seemed like everyone was premed, and for all the wrong reasons--mainly Ego. Oh, how they wanted to be called Dr.. 5. If you really want to become a doctor--for the right reasons--take your premed courses at a low income community college. You will ace the course. 6. Once you become a Doctor, don't use it as a stepping stool. Want to become wealthy--marry a rich kid. Want money and an Ego stroke--go into finance, or learn Ruby on Rails, but stay out of medicine. Want a baby in the middle of your career, and never plan on returning to medicine after your husband makes his wade--fine, but stay out of medical school--you just wasted a coveted spot.

good luck--grade grubbers!

By the way, I always felt the difference between A students and B students was a lot of ass kissing--at many colleges.

I liked o-chem, and I took 3 semesters of it, even though I was only minoring in chemistry. Its reputation as super-hard might have been motivation for me. Synthesis is a little like programming.

It really is!

The mental part of planning a synthesis is a lot like programming. The differences are: parts (i.e. reactions) are less interchangeable, and when you actually make the stuff, you get diminishing returns, "recompile" is not as trivial a task.

Synthetic biology is a lot closer, since you can copy DNA at will, and while editing is not as simple as spinning up an instance of vi, "recompile" is a whole heck of a lot easier.

I didn't take the organic chem lab course, because I had a bad time in lab I. The o-chem lab might have been better, since it was supposed to be more qualitative and less quantitative, so maybe it would have been less susceptible to shaky titration hands... but I didn't want to chance it. The analogy to programming only goes so far, but the differences were enjoyable to me, since I had plenty of exposure to real programming.