Afraid of Organic Chemistry? Preparation is the Key!
Your Approach to Learning and Studying Matters
You’ve probably heard that Orgo is “hard,” or that it’s a “weed-out course.” In this day and age, if you’re about to take Orgo, it’s almost impossible not to have heard that from someone! Maybe from a friend, from a former high school teacher, your mom or dad, or maybe from your doctor or dentist.
But is Orgo really that hard?
The answer is, it depends on how you approach things. Most students approach Orgo the same way they approached other courses they’ve taken, which is by trying to memorize everything.
The bottom line is that there’s WAY too much to memorize everything in Orgo—way too much!
But because memorization has been successful in other courses, that’s what most students still try to do, especially if they don’t know another way. It might even seem easy in the first week or two, but eventually it becomes too much; it becomes overwhelming. So for these students, chances are that they’ll find Orgo to be very hard, and possibly even a week-out.
Focus on Fundamental Concepts
But there is another way—one that’s much better and more effective than memorizing everything.
It’s understanding fundamental concepts, and learning to apply those concepts toward solving problems.
Why is this the better way? First of all, there aren’t that many fundamental concepts to learn—much, much fewer than the vast number of independent pieces of information you’d have to try to commit to memory.
Second, those fundamental concepts are pretty straightforward to understand, so learning them doesn’t take a lot of your investment. And third, those fundamental concepts are, well, fundamental, meaning that they are applied over and over and over throughout the entire course.
So, once you understand a fundamental concept and you’ve learned how to apply it toward solving a problem, it’s hardly much more effort to apply that concept again to solve another problem, or another.
Ultimately, by learning how to apply fundamental concepts toward solving problems, you could potentially save a tremendous amount of time!
Here’s the thing, though. It’s really easy for someone to tell you not to memorize, and that you should instead work on understanding and applying fundamental concepts. But HOW do you actually go about doing that, especially if the only way you’ve approached other courses in the past—perhaps the only way you know—is by memorization?
That’s exactly what you’ll learn in my Summer Orgo Prep self-paced short course. I’ll show you what those fundamental concepts are, one by one, and I’ll do so in ways that are quite manageable. And I’ll furthermore show you how the various concepts apply toward solving problems, the same kinds of problems students often face in Orgo.
The goal is for you to gain confidence in your ability to understand and apply fundamental Orgo concepts, and to buy into the idea that this is the better way to approach the course. With this kind of preparation, fear of Orgo should be a thing of the past.
