Why Summer Orgo Prep is the best way to prepare for Organic Chemistry. Part 1.
Okay, so you’re ahead of the game; you’ve decided to spend time in the weeks leading up to classes to prepare for your upcoming Orgo course. That’s a great decision! Especially because of the reasons I outlined in my blog post a few weeks ago, titled “5 Reasons to Prepare for Organic Chemistry Over the Summer”. But now comes the million-dollar question: What’s the BEST WAY to prepare for Organic Chemistry? If you’ve spent some time searching the Internet for different ways to prepare, you’ve probably found a lot of different things out there, and a lot of different pieces of advice. Some ways are better than others, of course, but there’s none better than my Summer Orgo Prep self-paced short course. To see why, let’s take a look at some of those other things that people suggest. And for each one, I’ll explain to you why Summer Orgo Prep is the better way to go.
My plan is to do this over the next few blog posts, so we can spend some time talking about each of those other suggestions, one at a time. Today, we’re going answer this question:
Why is Summer Orgo Prep better than you reading through the textbook you’re going to use in your actual Orgo course?
Some people will tell you to get a hold of the textbook that’ll you’ll be using in your actual Orgo course, and juststart reading it and working problems from it. But there are some major problems with that. One has to do with the biggest reason why students tend to struggle with Organic Chemistry in the first place, which is that they take the wrong approach toward learning the material. As I explained in my blog post titled “Afraid of Organic Chemistry? Preparation is the Key!”, too many students try to memorize their way through Orgo, but the right way to approach things is to focus on understanding concepts, and to work on applying those concepts toward solving problems. Textbooks don’t really provide that kind of training; they typically expect that you already know the right approach, and that you’ll just do it. But my Summer Orgo Prep self-paced short course doesn’t take that for granted. Instead, I spend considerable time actually teaching you the right approach, and convincing you of it.
A second problem with reading through the textbook as a way to prepare is that it’s just really inefficient when you’re trying to learn from it on your own. It’s inefficient because textbooks tend to be quite dense, with a lot of information packed into each page. And on top of that, textbooks don’t cut out topics; they tend to cover everything! So, not only is it slow-going, but it’s difficult for you to know what the big take-away lessons are from what you read. My Summer Orgo Prep self-paced short course, on the other hand, is very efficient, designed to be completed in just a couple weeks, a few hours a day. That’s because I keep the focus on just the things that will help prepare you, not on the more in-depth material your professor will cover later in your actual course. And I focus on presenting things at YOUR level, in ways that speak TO you, not above you.
Third, textbooks tend to have pretty high expectations when it comes to what they want you to remember from General Chemistry. In fact, a lot of textbooks have a short Chapter 1, where they whiz through a year’s worth of General Chemistry review in about 30 pages. That’s just unfair for a lot of students, which is why I do things differently in my Summer Orgo Prep self-paced short course. I realize that it’s been some time since you’ve done General Chemistry, and I realize that you may not have had the best experience in that course. So, in Summer Orgo Prep, I take more time to review the most important General Chemistry concepts. And I spend even more time showing you explicitly how those ideas apply toward solving specific types of Organic Chemistry problems.
Finally, as I explained in my blog post titled “The #1 Most Important Organic Chemistry Concept to Master”, a concept called reactions mechanisms tends to be the biggest difference between struggle and success in the course. Textbooks often don’t get to the topic of reaction mechanisms until Chapter 5 or later. And with each chapter taking days of your time (remember, textbooks tend to be inefficient!), you won’t begin to gain a sense of the most important concept until a few weeks after you start reading through the textbook. But in Summer Orgo Prep, even in Module 1, I spend a good amount of time discussing the general idea behind reaction mechanisms, at a level that’s manageable. It’s important for you to have that sense of what reaction mechanisms are, and why they’re so helpful when it comes to learning Organic Chemistry, so that you know what it is that you’re working toward from the very beginning.
In closing…
It might sound like a good idea to get a hold of your Orgo textbook and start reading through it to prepare, but it’s just not the best. My Summer Orgo Prep self-paced short course is the better way to go, for a variety of reasons: (1) Summer Orgo Prep teaches you the right approach to learning Organic Chemistry, whereas textbooks tend to just expect that you already know; (2) Summer Orgo Prep is far more efficient in giving you the preparation you need; (3) Summer Orgo Prep does a better job helping you through the General Chemistry concepts you need to know, and showing you how to use them in solving Organic Chemistry problems; and (4) unlike textbooks, Summer Orgo Prep, from the very beginning, starts to give you a sense of the #1 most important concept you need to master: reaction mechanisms.
