5 Reasons to Prepare for Organic Chemistry Over the Summer
Considering whether you should use your summer to prepare for your upcoming Orgo course? Here are 5 reasons why spending your summer preparing for Orgo could be the right choice for you.
1. Decreased time during the school year.
Success in Orgo demands quite a bit of time. But during the actual school year, many things compete for your time: friends, family, sleep, student organizations, earning money, fun and entertainment, and…oh, other classes!
Too often, students taking Orgo simply don’t have enough time to meet all those demands, and their Orgo performance suffers. By preparing for Orgo over the summer, learning (or re-learning) much of the material will take less of your time, and you’ll be in a much better position to meet all the demands on your time throughout the term.
2. Decreased focus during the school year.
During the school year, not only do a lot of things compete for your time, but many of those same things are distractions, too. If those distractions become too severe, it makes learning a lot more difficult. Over the summer, however, many students have much larger blocks of time to work with, and fewer distractions. That can help a lot with focus, and with better focus, learning can be a lot more effective.
3. Increased stress during the school year
The factors that lead to decreased time and decreased focus during the school year can ultimately cause more stress. The opposite is true as well: With more time and focus available over the summer, you can learn in a much lower-stress environment, especially if you can spread the time out over several weeks or a few months. A lower-stress environment can lead to much more effective learning.
4. Start off in a position of strength.
Unlike many other courses, Orgo is essentially a continuous story that unfolds from the beginning of the term to the end. In other words, just about everything that is taught later in the course depends on your mastery of stuff that was taught earlier. That’s especially true for the foundational concepts that are covered at the beginning of the course.
In many Orgo courses, however, those foundational concepts are covered at a very rapid pace, and any holes that you have in that foundational material can easily lead to big problems later on. By preparing over the summer, you’ll be in a much better position to handle that rush through the foundational material, and that will help strengthen your ability to learn the later material.
5. Stay unconfused.
Because of the demands on your time, and because many Orgo courses rush through the early foundational material, many students quickly find themselves playing catch-up a week or two into the term. They’re confused, and then they end up spending time and effort trying to fix their weaknesses and their misunderstandings, all while new material continues to be taught.
By preparing over the summer and staying unconfused from the very outset of the course, you’ll be in a much better position to stay on top of the new material when it’s taught.
Prepare now. You’ll be glad you did.
