Day 3 - Foundations

As predicted, today's lecture was very "introductory". The Dr. Revers did touch upon "nucleophilic addition to carbonyls" during the last 30 minutes of the 1-hour lecture. In my last post, I spoke about the benefits of doing the readings beforehand. Truth be told, the lecture did in fact reinforce a lot of the important things I read in the text last night and I was able to better understand everything simply because I had that "in-depth" extensive background info provided by Chapter 6 under my sleeve.

Dr. Revers uses the textbook as a reference, but has his own teaching style. Clayden sometimes puts emphasis on things that Dr. Leigh puts to the side. Use your own discretion when it comes to deciding where to focus your energy during readings. For Orgo 1, I focused more towards lectures and YouTube videos rather than the textbook, mainly because reading is time consuming and I didn't have time leftover from studying for four other courses.

With that being said, do not underestimate the importance of a thorough understanding in Orgo. The only reason I performed the way I did in Orgo 1 was because I put tremendous effort into creating my foundations. With an in-depth understanding of chemistry, you no longer have to memorize a damn thing. It just becomes a game of shapes and pushing electrons that you can easily predict based on simple principles.

"Build Your Foundations - Don't Just Memorize"

Well, how do I build my foundations?
Your call. I did readings, I read every page and took notes on everything. For the first four months of Organic Chemistry, "Why?" what 51% of what came out of my mouth. If that doesn't fly with you, then watch YouTube videos or read articles, or re-listen to older lectures you recorded. The main point is, and I can't stress this enough, make your foundations strong. 

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Dr. Revers going over MO's and ripping apart the Bohr model.

After lecture, Dr. Leigh stuck around for about an hour and a half going over some stuff with a few students. Again, tremendously helpful and insanely insightful. I recommend spending as much time with our professor outside of class. Almost all professors will teach you more than you need to know and drop hints like easter eggs. You can really begin to understand what is important and what isn't when you spend after-class/office hours with the professor. There's a solid chance you might learn something new that makes everything just 'click'. I live for those "A-ha!" moments. 

Today, he re-explained the utility of some of the reagents we touched upon in class:

1. Organometallics

2. Grignard Reagants

He also explained some concepts from Orgo 1 that students needed to polish up on. I'm glad there are students asking him questions from Orgo 1, because as you already know, Orgo 2 is intrinsically based on everything we learned in Orgo 1. Although my foundations from Orgo 1 are strong, I always stick around for even the most basic questions and explanations, because there's always a chance I'll learn something new, and it keeps my Chemistry foundations fresh.