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Why Organic Chemistry Is So Difficult For Pre-Med Students
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Science writer and 42-year old pre-med student Barbara Moran writes in the NY Times that organic chemistry has been haunting pre-meds since 1910, when the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a landmark report calling for tougher admission standards to medical school and for medical training based on science. "The organic chemistry on the MCAT is chemistry that students need to know to succeed in medical school," says Karen Mitchell, senior director of the MCAT Program. Basically, orgo examines how molecules containing carbon interact, but it doesn't require equations or math, as in physics. Instead, you learn how electrons flow around and between molecules, and you draw little curved arrows showing where they go. This "arrow pushing" is the heart and soul of orgo. "Learning how to interpret the hieroglyphics is pretty easy. The hard part is learning where to draw the little arrows," writes Moran. "After you draw oxygen donating electrons to a positive carbon a zillion times, it becomes second nature." But the rules have many exceptions, which students find maddening. The same molecule will behave differently in acid or base, in dark or sunlight, in heat or cold, or "if you sprinkle magic orgo dust on it and turn around three times." You can't memorize all the possible answers — you have to rely on intuition, generalizing from specific examples. This skill, far more than the details of every reaction, may actually be useful for medicine. "It seems a lot like diagnosis," says Logan McCarty. "That cognitive skill — inductive generalization from specific cases to something you've never seen before — that's something you learn in orgo." This takes a huge amount of time, for me 20 to 30 hours a week writes Moran. This is one thing that orgo is testing: whether you have the time and desire to do the work. "Sometimes, if a student has really good math skills, they can slide through physics, but you can't do that in orgo," says McCarty ."
I wasn't pre-med, I was a chem major and the hardest class for me was orgo due to the same reasons mentioned above.
Dumb it down, just like everything else.
Or maybe it's just me. I found physical chemistry more challenging.
Horrors ! What's a premed to do? Surely they don't expect them to actually understand something?!?
Students learn organic by memorization. It is unfortunate but it's the truth. That said, we expect med students to excel at memorization and regurgitation so OChem is a good tool for learning that. The problem though is that we de-incentivize actual comprehension as the students learn that they won't need >90% of what they memorized in OChem later on (if we exclude that which is acceptable to look up in a reference later).
Quite true. My father is a clinical chemist, having a Ph.D. on the topic and even having taught at an Ivy League university. As a child, I read some of his tomes on things like toxicology and diabetes, just out of boredom. (I read a lot as a kid.) His advice to me when I was going to college? "Don't take organic chem if you don't need it." I've always been good at science, but the gist of it is that orgo is just a long litany of exceptions, like a nightmarishly inconsistent language. Hence the memorization...and the difficulty. Yes, mapping out the electrons helps a bit, but in truth that's more used like a requirement than an aid in keeping straight what is really going on at the molecular level. At one point I took a peek into orgo, and entirely understood the advice I'd been given all those years before. Holy crap...
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Ever tried physics? It's all about applying rules to situations you have never seen before and it is not just restricted to carbon-based molecules.
As my two brothers whom are doctors say, If you want to learn to think, go to law school, medicine is memorizing. It is a generalization, but a fairly accurate one. This isn't what separates good doctors from bad doctors, it is what separates doctors from non-doctors.
First, a disclaimer to prove I don't mean this as bragging - I sucked at gen chem. I found it painfully tedious - Basically 100% having humans do things that computers do much, much better.
;)
But I aced Orgo with fairly little effort. It just makes sense, once you master those basic rules - You have your carbon skeletons, your functional groups, your resonances, then mix in chirality, spice it up with a few inorganic substitutions, and bam!, the rest becomes like a good, satisfying puzzle - Spin the structures around in your head, and see where the electrons "want" to go.
If Orgo has a reputation for being hard, it has that only by virtue of having boring ol' gen chem teachers trying to explain something outside their comfort zone. I consider myself lucky to have had something of a "reformed hippie" for a prof, with a godlike skill for getting us to see not what happens, but why.
Put another way - If you can't solve the problems without consulting lookup tables and using a calculator, you have no shot whatsoever at understanding something at an intuitive level. When you can memorize all the rules in your first month or two, the rest becomes just fun.
Then again, a "friend" of mine did a lot of psychotropics back then. That might have helped.
It's one thing to understand the quantum mechanical underpinnings (thank you Linus Pauling) and quite another for the calculations involving same to be tractable. I've always loved the idea of chem as a branch of physics, but AFAIK it's simply not tractable. I believe some work is being done on it with supercomputers, but it's far from solving everything.
After having talked to numerous doctors on whom have been part of admission selection committees for different medical schools this is the consensus I have reached as to why Orgo is required for medschool. Orgoanic chemistry is looked at as a weed out class. In particular, they believe that good grades from second semester (quarter 2,3) in Orgo prove the ability of the student to be able to solve complex problems because the later part of most organic chemistry courses focus on synthesis. They believe that good grades in second semester orgo will translate into a doctors ability to see the long term solution and that good grades are indicative of an ability to plan a multistep process for patient recovery.
An indecisive doctor is a shitty doctor.
But one who thinks they know everything and always make the right decisions is even worse. Confidence and humility are not mutually exclusive.
Have Walter White teach it.... where do I sign up?
More like if you want to do memorization without killing someone if you are wrong, become a lawyer. I've yet to meet a lawyer who has impressed me with their ability to think.
I've graduated from med school about 9 years ago and I still remember organic chemistry just as if I've closed the book yesterday. I had to learn it in high-school, I had to learn it in medical school. It is hard to learn, but it does help a lot. Fact is you can't know all the drugs that are out there being prescribed. But if you ask the patient for the box and have a look at the active ingredient name, you can immediately place it in one of the major groups. At least you will not confuse a pain relief drug with a psychotrope or an anti-hypertensive. It's just as useful as most of the disciplines studied in medical school. It helps a future doctor form reflexes towards substance recognition that will baffle even some of their colleagues and impress the hospital pharmacist :)
I have a PhD in chemistry, so I've been through all the classes mentioned.
Organic is, in fact, the only one you absolutely CAN memorize. Unlike the math-based chemistry classes where you have to learn principles, which the pre-meds struggle mightily with, the memorization-heavy organic chemistry is the one that is considered to be similar enough to medical school that it is used as a weed-out.
This is particularly true of organic *synthesis*, vs. organic *mechanisms*. Mechanistic organic is often presented as a first semester organic class, and that does actually require knowledge and understanding. Synthesis, however, is nearly straight memorization, even if you don't want to.
I was happy when the pre-meds stopped taking the major-level chemistry classes (mostly after organic). It made my physical chemistry classes much more interesting. It didn't keep the one pre-med in the class from whining the entire time that he wasn't getting the answers spoon-fed to him from the book, though.
So I don't know where the author is coming from, because they completely got it wrong.
PhD chemist here. Organic chemistry is perfect to weed out people who will not make it as doctors. In truth, organic chemistry is not a "hard" science: it does not come from basic principles, like say phys. chem. The only way to succeed at organic chemistry is to memorize, memorize, memorize. The more you memorize, the easier it is to see similarities between the cases, which are just like law cases or medicine cases. Hence, I would support mandatory organic chemistry for pre-med students. For chemistry major students, not so much...
My younger self was an absolute fuckwit, at times. He also managed to last long enough to turn into my older self, who tries to not be too smug about how much he has improved. My younger self also was busy making the mistakes my older self has learned from. As a completely off topic example it took me about 5 years to figure out there were some things I did that women absolutely hated, and another 5 years to figure out that maybe I should stop doing them.
Pauling's chemistry involved valence bond theory (VB) but today most modern chemistry involves molecular orbital theory (MO). An up to date course in organic chem will have a great deal of MO theory, for instance in an understanding of the bonding and chemistry of aromatic compounds and such things as sigmatropic reactions with the use of Woodward-Hoffman rules. Today's chemists need to know both MO and VB theories and where each is appropriately used. These bonding theories are an important basis for all chemistry and give direction to understanding what and why chemistry occurs. Organic chemistry courses that just involve memorization of named reactions is a thing of the past and shouldn't be tolerated.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Biology->Chemistry->Physics->Math->Philosophy->Linguistics->Religion->Anthropology->Psychology->Biology... QED
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
FTA: "I asked two medical school deans â" Dr. Robert Witzburg at Boston University and Dr. Lee Goldman at Columbia University â" about admission philosophies. Both are proponents of holistic review, the newish idea that medical schools look beyond grades and test scores to evaluate the whole applicant."
What this really means is that we are getting to many Asians. We need slots for the children of donors, and big wigs, and for affirmative action cases.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Sure, confidence about their profession and the subject matter that entails.
Confidence that because they're MDs and therefore every other subject matter must be trivial compared to their social status... that's just disgusting when up against it.
I had a conversation with an MD once when I used to work taking calls at a call center that went something like this. Now, this was at a separate company from the hospital and the MD's practice that had no access to the hospital or doctor's schedule.
MD: "Are you illiterate? Why are you paging me when I'm in surgery? Are you too stupid to read what's in front of your face?"
Me: "There's no information like that here. How can we find out when you're in surgery?"
MD: "I don't need to tell you that because the problem is your lack of reading comprehension, Velex."
Me: "Can somebody call us before you go into surgery so we can put a note here that says to hold your..."
MD: "I don't need to put up with your attitude. Don't worry about coming into work tomorrow, Velex, because you don't have a job anymore."
Somehow, that doctor was unable to fire me, and I came in the next day just fine.
An MD who can't even figure out that he needs to get the practice manager to fax over his schedule or have an RN call in when he's going into surgery if he doesn't want to be paged while in surgery is a shitty problem-solver. That's not somebody I'd want giving me advice about something as important as my health. I'd sure as hell never want to be under that guy's knife.
Of course, as others have pointed out, it all boils down to how the AMA keeps MDs artificially scarce so that their wages are inflated way beyond what they need to be. Org chem is that difficult because it's a weed-out course. We need to drop our collective attitude that MDs are something special. Open up more residency positions, let MD wages plummet from $400k down to around $100k where they ought to be, end hazing practices in residency programs, regulate their hours worked just the same as we regulate truck drivers' hours and for the same reasons too, and a lot of these problems will solve themselves.
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On the contrary, a 42 year old is typically a much more efficient worker. He knows what works and what doesn't and how to get things done and the skills he must use daily are highly practiced. What he lacks is the seemingly boundless energy and often stubbornness of youth. That's also of value, because it helps the young spend the time to develop skills that take years to master.
It's probably true that 42 year olds don't learn as fast as the young, but they typically have less to learn having learned a lot already.
O-chem is useless for practicing physicians. Took it, did OK at it, passed the required tests in undergrad and early med school, never used it again. Licensing boards understand this; there is no organic chemistry on the final board examinations for Internal Medicine.
In fact, thinking you understand low-level chemistry and biology can be dangerous for a practicing physician. For example, beta-blocker blood pressure medicines slow your heart rate and make your heart "squeeze" less strongly. We were initially taught that you should never give them to patients with heart failure -- their hearts didn't beat strongly to begin with. Given a basic understanding of the underlying biology withholding the medication made sense. Until someone studied them and found that for patients with mild heart failure beta-blockers reduced hospitalizations and death. And we had been withholding them for years. Whoops.
You don't want your doctor prescribing things based on their understanding of biology. You want them prescribing on the basis of clinical trial data and statistics.
Wrong. Wrong. wrong.
Sometimes, if a student has really good math skills, they can slide through physics, but you can't do that in orgo," says McCarty
1) Orgo? WTF? There is no course in the chemistry curriculum called "orgo". It's o-chem, or organic, or organic chemistry, if you're not into the whole brevity thing. There is no orgo.
2) "You can do blah in physics, but you can't do that in o-chem???" Please, deity, make sure this person never becomes a doctor. Or a parent.
Chemistry is not magic. It is not random. It is not subject to the whims of mystical forces. The atoms and molecules one studies in o-chem are governed by the rules of physics. Those rules are described in the language of math. It's like saying knowing English will help you read plays, but it won't help you with Shakespeare.
If you have the background, and are good at math, then pchem is easy. But orgo is just lots and lots of memorization.
What is this I don't even know. I expect that sort of attitude from someone who hasn't taken p-chem, but you should know better. Especially if you take p-chem before o-chem.
As for memorization, I somehow managed to get through organic without it. Even before years of /. and fark wrapped my fragile little mind my memory was shiat. In high school trig there were a bunch of equations we were supposed to memorize--sin2a, cos(a+b), cos(a-b), that sort of stuff. Well, like I said, my memory was shiat. Turns out, if you remember the definitions of sin, cos, and tan, all those other equations and identities can be derived.
So that's what I did. I memorized those 3 definitions, and derived everything else as needed during the exam.
Organic is the same way. Sure, you could get through by rote memorized of a list of facts and statements without bothering with understanding. But the same could be said of just about any course or class.
But it's a lot easier (or it was for me at least) to remember a small set of simple rules, and then apply them. Of course, that requires a step beyond rote memorization to some actual understanding of those rules to know how and when to apply them. So where do you get those rules and that understanding?
Take p-chem. Take p-chem first, and then o-chem. O-chem is just an application of the rules you'll learn in p-chem. O-chem requires no more memorization then any other college course (and perhaps less).
It's all about charges--electrons are negative, hydrogen ions are positive. Like charges repel, different charges attract. If you have a positive charge, that's where your electrons will go. If you have a negative charge, that's where your hydrogen will go. Draw arrows as needed.
As a practicing physician I find organic chemistry that I studies (and aced) in pre-med is entirely useless and irrelevant to me. It certainly weeds out people who are not motivated to jump through hoops to get into med school. It is unclear, however, that it selects for the people who would benefit the medical profession (or who would derive benefit from it, for that matter). I personally think it would be a much more sane choice to require software engineering to be included in pre-med curriculum.
Hi folks, Nice to imagine that something about "orgo" is fruitful to the process of making doctors, but I disagree. Organic chemistry has NOTHING to do with day to day doctoring for probably 99.9% of us. I don't have to draw a molecule of penicillin or know anything about how it interacts with other molecules in order to use it for strep throat or syphilis. We need in this day and age doctors who know science, probability, the human psyche, communication, and teamwork. But they don't need to know organic chemistry. And there are other fruitful ways to weed out those who can't hack it in med school. I know because I am a physician and I teach medical students and resident physicians in New York. --JSt