Learn Organic Chemistry

Study of organic chemistry has gained a very high importance due to its relevance for many career oriented fields. Any field related with medicine requires its in depth knowledge. In fact any career in the Chemical Industry would be a non-starter without a thorough knowledge of Organic Chemistry.

A number of students take up Organic Chemistry (Orgo Chem) courses in their exuberance. However the rate of dropouts in the very first semester itself is very high - nearly 60-70 percent. The primary reasons for the poor grades is that students often try to cram the lessons instead of trying to gain a good understanding of the topics. Since Orgo Chem has a vast scope, it is impossible to memorize it and hence cramming becomes self defeating after some time.

In my experience of over 20 years teaching Orgo Chem, I have realized that org-chem is very simple to understand if we go about it in a systematic manner. The focus in learning Orgo Chem should be on understanding the topics and cementing the knowledge gained by relating it to a number of examples. Some of the aspects which can help the students gain a good command over the subject are as follows:

Gain A Good Understanding Of The Important Concepts Of General Chemistry Course This will help you lay a solid foundation for the Organic Chemistry. These are as follows:

Periodic table and important periodic trends e.g electro negativity and electron affinity.
Lewis Dot Structure, VSEPR Structures and calculations of formal charges.
Resonance and Hybrid structures.
Acid - Base properties and factors affecting the acidity / basicity of the molecules like oxidation number, electronegativity and atomic size.
Hybridization.
Basic concepts of chemical equilbrium and thermo chemistry.

Achieve Full Understanding Of Structures, Names And Shapes Of The Organic Molecules. If you wish to master Orgo Chem you must master the naming and drawing out structures of the organic molecules. Let me assure you that the IUPAC System of nomenclature is very systematic and you only need to practice the rules for naming and drawing structures of the compounds. If name of the compound is given and by applying the rules the structure can be easily drawn. To take an example, in case of 2-Butanol, But signifies a 4 Carbon chain, ol signifies alcohol (-OH) group and 2 indicates that OH group is present on the second carbon. Hence the structure will appear like this:

CH3 - CH(OH) - CH2 - CH3

It is as simple as that. Believe me, a lot of students would get stuck at this step itself if they did not try to understand the logic but instead tried to memorize the structure. Naming of compounds or making their structures from a given name can be played as a interesting game with friends.

There are however a few compounds for which the IUPAC nomenclature is not followed and these compounds are popularly known with their common names e.g aniline is actually aminobenzene, tert-butyl alcohol is 1,1-dimethylethanol and vinyl chloride is 1-chloroethene. Do not get worried as there are only 10-15 of these exceptions of names and structures which you need to practice

Understanding The Concepts Of Organic Chemistry.Orgo Chem concepts are the building blocks which are used again and again in reasoning and explanations of the mechanisms. There are just about 20 important basic concepts on which you can build up the complete mechanisms and reasoning. For example, in most of the mechanisms, H+ acts as catalyst and protonates the atom containing lone pair.