Students often ask me, “How should I study my organic chemistry course”? The internet is flooded with students asking how they should study organic chemistry and the best way to memorize all the reactions. There’s also an equal number of answers telling them to dive right into practice problems or to make flash cards. These are likely not the best methods for most students. As with almost everything in life, there are a million ways to do something and studying for an organic chemistry course is no different. Here, I’ll go into the details of one proven method of preparing for and doing well in organic chemistry courses. I’ve taken virtually every organic chemistry course in undergraduate and graduate studies and have used the same method to excel in each.
Step 1: Go to the lectures (optional)
Attending your lectures will ensure you get the initial exposure to the material. You’ll hear useful information from your professor directly related to what you’ll be evaluated on during your course. You’ll also get a chance to interact with other students, see what and how much they understood, and ask questions. The reason I wrote in the subheading that this part is optional is that these days, lecture slides and even entire videos are posted online, and you don’t always have to be physically present to gather the information. Before laptops and tablets were easily accessible for most students, we had to sit in lectures just to make sure we didn’t miss relevant information.
However, we don’t all learn the same way, so some people, myself included, don’t always benefit from sitting in a lecture and listening to someone verbally say the material. When I was doing my studies, I had to see and read the material myself in order to understand and start learning it. It’s up to you to decide for yourself whether lecture attendance does or doesn’t help you personally.
Step 2: Make Your Own Notes Based on the Lecture Notes
Once you either attend the university/college lecture or obtain the lecture slides for the course, the next step is to take the time to write your own condensed notes from the lecture slides. This step is very important for several reasons:
You will learn to filter out what’s important from what’s just lecture filler.
Your hand/brain will start getting used to writing out the chemical structures. It’s not enough to just look at them and hope to retain them.
It’ll save you a lot of time when the time comes to study for a test or exam, as you’ll have only the important stuff to study and won’t have to flip through 150 lecture slides of filler and examples
You should make the notes the way that works for you, but this is exactly what I did:
I would download the lecture slides from the professor’s site, usually as PowerPoint slides.
I would go through each slide and write down only the reactions and mechanisms in a physical notebook, ignoring large amounts of text and examples. I would still read everything to ensure I understood it, but I wouldn’t include it in my notes unless it was absolutely valuable. Below is an example of how I structured the notes in my notebook after going through the lecture slides.
If I had extra time, I would make a separate cheat sheet for that specific chapter, which had only the reactions and nothing else. The cheat sheet gave me a quick visual overview of everything learned during that whole chapter without every detail being there.
I wrote study guides and cheat sheets specifically for students who want to save the time it takes them to write their own notes. The study guides and cheat sheets can be found here. However, it’s important to understand that these are just a time saver and not a substitute for the work you put in yourself to learn the material.
Important note: Use either the lectures or lecture notes to make your own notes, rather than the textbook. You’re probably wondering at this point, “Why’s this guy telling me not to use textbooks?”. This is certainly not the case. Textbooks are a great aid for gaining a deeper understanding of the material. However, basing your notes on the lecture material will save time while you’re first learning the material and will also ensure that you learn exactly what your professor expects and will include in the evaluations. Textbooks usually have far more material than what will be tested during the course.
Step 3: Rewrite the Reactions and Mechanisms on Scrap Paper
When the test or exam time approached, I would open up my own notebook with all of the reactions and mechanisms and start rewriting them, onto scrap paper. I would rewrite one reaction 2-5 times until I retained it and then move on to the mechanism or on to the next reaction. Once I progressed to each subsequent reaction, I would periodically go back to the previous one and rewrite it from memory to make sure I could still do it. I would repeat this process for every reaction and mechanism that would be on the test.
Much like mathematics, organic chemistry is a visual subject that involves a lot of reactions, mechanisms, diagrams, and charts. You wouldn’t study for a calculus course by just looking at or reading all of the equations, and it’s the same thing with organic chemistry. You need to get used to writing out all of the structures and reactions, and the quicker you pick up this routine, the sooner you’ll start progressing in your course.
Step 3.5: Start Identifying Patterns in the Material (Optional but highly recommended)
This step is optional, although it can cut down your study time significantly and help you avoid the dreaded “M” word – memorization. Investing a little bit of time while writing out the reactions and mechanisms in observing patterns will go a long way. Take for example alkene reactions. Can it be said that most of them involve the nucleophilic addition of alkene pi electrons on an electrophile? How about electrophilic aromatic substitution? In those examples we see that the sigma complex is always created in the same way and the only thing that changes is the way the activated electrophile is made, and we can find patterns even there.
Finding and noting down these patterns for yourself will not only prevent you from having to blindly memorize each and every reaction and mechanism, it’ll also greatly help with material retention as you’ll be actively thinking about what you’re reading and writing out.
Step 4: Do as Many Practice Problems as Possible
Many students, sometimes based on the professors’ advice, dive into the practice problems right after each lecture and get frustrated and scared that they can’t answer any of them, and they label organic chemistry as a brutal subject. The truth is, you can’t start answering questions about material you didn’t learn and retain first. I put this as the last step of the learning process because only once you’ve put in the time to learn the reactions and mechanisms, and hopefully identified some patterns along the way, are you ready to start answering questions.
Step 5: Take Advantage of Group Study and Office hours
As a fellow Redditor pointed out to me, forming a study group with your friends or classmates is also a great way to learn as it provides you both with new ideas as well as different perspectives on the material. It's also a quick way to clarify any questions you might have had while going through the lecture material. Professors' or teaching assistants' office hours are also a valuable resource that can be combined with group study in order to reinforce the concepts. Office hours tend to be a heavily under-utilized resource as a lot of students may be shy, don't want to bother with showing up at a specific time, or think they don't need them. However, many professors are very friendly and oftentimes offer a unique perspective on the material, as well as tips and tricks, that students may not get from course note or group study learning.
Conclusion
There are many ways to study courses, dependent on both the type of course and the individual. In the past students have told me that their preferred way of studying organic chemistry is by reading the text aloud in order to absorb it, followed by re-reading the reactions and mechanisms in hopes of memorizing them. This often has yielded poor results or no results at all. I have outlined a detailed answer to “How do I study my organic chemistry course?” so those struggling to figure out where to start have a defined path forward. As long as you’re willing to put in the time, the above method will produce results.
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