Pre-Preparing For My Organic Chemistry I Class

Of all the pre-requisite classes for medical school, Organic Chemistry has the reputation for being the hardest: it is known as the Dream Killer, and for good reason. It's a "weed out" class, where averages can be in the 40-50% range, which means people either end up dropping the class and/or abandoning their pre-med pursuits. It certainly happened to me: try as I might to memorize the pathways, nothing stuck, and while I passed the course, a B-/C+ in the course series is not impressive. I have had people tell me horror stories of their interviews at schools, where the interviewer had highlighted their orgo scores in their files or had demanded to know why the candidate had such a poor score in that class.

That is why I chose orgo as the first class I want to retake in my DIY post-bacc. Not only will this be extremely helpful in improving my sGPA/BCPM grades if I do well, but it will also be a strong refresher for the physical sciences portion of the MCAT: while I know physics is a weakness and can practice the math for it to do decently, whenever my practice exams or real exams had a bulk of organic chemistry problems, I was never able to score high. I always felt a bit ashamed of my inability to grasp orgo because my dad is a polymer chemist who works with these kinds of reactions all the time. Going to him for help was a fruitless endeavor, however, because when you have someone working in the field doing complicated stuff all the time, they forget how to teach someone the basics. I would spend hours with my dad, and we would only get through a single problem in a set, reducing me to tears.

It is a little insane that I am signing up for a summer course, as the pace will be intense, and as someone with a full time job, I won't have that much time to study as the class meets 4 days a week for about 3 hours at a time. I'll be learning what most people learn in 15 weeks in less than half that (seven weeks), but I would like to point out that Drexel's terms were 10 weeks, and we covered the same amount, so I know what it is like to have a brutal pace. And to help alleviate some of my anxiety, I'm starting to learn the concepts before the class even starts so that I will have a basic understanding before I even sit down for the first lecture.

Normally, I pre-read for classes by reading the textbook (which I will be doing before each lecture, just not before class even starts, as the book is an intimidating size). This time I researched tools for learning Organic Chemistry, and the book that kept popping up over and over in these searches was Organic Chemistry as a Second Language by David Klein. The summer class I am taking is actually using David Klein's full textbook, so I thought it would be prudent to buy the Second Language book as a companion. I'm on chapter two, and I have to say, it has been an invaluable resource. The book is not intended to replace the textbook; rather, it is a supplemental workbook/study guide of the major concepts you need to master as you go through the class. And when I say companion book, I mean it: I read the first few textbook chapters and they give a lot more information than was in the SL book.

I've made a lot of mistakes, but what I'm doing is every time I make a mistake, I mark it and write out why my original answer was incorrect. This helps me identify which concepts I need to solidify as I go on. Then I can redo the problem until I get it correct, or I can use the textbook or other resource to find new, similar questions. I'll try to blog about any resources I use while taking the course.