Who is the guy behind Organic Chemistry Tutoring and What does he do?
Foreword: A bit about me and why I tutor organic chemistry
Hi everyone, I'm Mike! I'm a pharmaceutical synthetic organic research chemist by profession and an organic chemistry tutor. While I've tutored virtually every university-level organic chemistry course, such as organic I, II, third-year and fourth-year organic synthesis, mechanisms, organometallic chemistry, biochemistry, and medicinal chemistry, these days, I mainly focus on organic I and II as most students seem to be struggling with the introductory courses primarily.
How I Got into Organic Chemistry
I've known since middle school, about the 7th grade, that I liked chemistry. It started with a teacher showing the class a video involving liquid nitrogen, and I found the concept so exotic that I wanted to learn more. That curiosity also persisted through high school, and I had good grades in science courses. Science, and more specifically chemistry, came easily to me, and I knew I wanted to study it in university as well. I didn't know yet what I wanted to do for work at some point in the future, but chemistry was cool, and that's what I wanted to study.
I found first-year chemistry ok, not very difficult, but not too exciting overall as it was still mostly general concepts and a few calculations. Soon came the time to pick second-year courses, and I lined my schedule with analytical, physical, inorganic, and organic chemistry. Analytical and physical had a lot of statistics and math. It was ok, but not mainly what interested me. Organic and inorganic seemed cool but had many more concepts and memorization than analytical and physical. By then, I had developed a study system for learning the concepts efficiently, and my grades automatically increased in the two non-mathematical subjects. From there, I chose more organic chemistry courses because studying for them was fairly straightforward, and I knew I could maintain a higher average. So, in a way, organic chemistry chose me.
Why I Tutor Organic Chemistry
When I started my first full course of organic chemistry in the second year of university, I was still in my old habit of studying subjects by either reading notes or textbook pages several times and hoping to just memorize the concepts by looking at them. This didn't work well for me, and it showed that my grades were initially bad to mediocre. At that time, I met a new friend in an analytical chemistry lab who was doing much better in organic chemistry. Frustrated, I asked him how he was able to memorize so many reactions and diagrams so much more easily than me. I told him I would re-read the lecture notes and textbook pages, but the information wasn't sticking. That's when he suggested that I re-write the reactions, mechanisms, and diagrams on scrap paper. I tried this, and it had an immediate effect. I was soon hooked to this study method.
Soon after, I refined my own study process so it involved going to lectures, copying down what was written on the blackboards (PowerPoint slides came later, they weren't prevalent when I started university and most profs weren't using them), and then making my own condensed notes, which I would then re-write on scrap paper in order to learn.
The main reason I tutor organic chemistry is that I still find it surprising how poorly the subject is often presented in courses and how students aren't taught how to learn it. Many students I work with are often overwhelmed with how many reactions are presented in a short period of time, and, on top of that, each one has an associated mechanism. The courses also seem to place more emphasis on outright memorization rather than problem-solving. A big conundrum, that one often encounters in more than one university course is how you start solving a problem that seems vaguely related to stuff you've done in the lectures but otherwise seems unfamiliar. Through tutoring, one of my main objectives is to ask students abstract questions regarding the material they're learning and guide them through how to approach solving the problem. I often see during sessions that students try to guess an answer upfront to a question that isn't straightforward and seem to give up when they can't think of a whole solution to the problem right away.
Overall, my role is that of a guide. I present students with alternate explanations to the concepts they're learning, show them one or more ways of efficiently making their own notes, and teach them how to approach problem solving in organic chemistry, which can then be translated to other courses.
If you'd like to undertake this journey together, feel free to text or e-mail me so we can chat about your needs and how I can help.
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