September 1, 2019

Organic Chemistry Tutor Portland Oregon

Organic chemistry is widely accepted—and universally feared—as one of the most difficult and challenging college courses. It’s incredibly complex because of the sheer amount of content you are forced to learn in a short time. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of rules to memorize and commit to memory. One small mistake with these can cost you a significant number of points. But that’s just the beginning.

Organic chemistry is challenging because it requires you to think critically. Successful students need to have an understanding of a vast framework of conceptual ideas. They need to be able to visualize molecules and understand and predict entire reaction sequences in their head. Students are asked to do all of this while remembering thousands of rules, each with multiple distinctions and degrees of nuance.

Because organic chemistry is so hard, many of the teachers aren’t good at teaching it! This compounds the problem. Most organic chemistry professors aren’t good at explaining the difficult concepts they teach. Thus, many students struggle. And some choose to not take the class entirely. I’ve met people who chose not to become doctors, or who avoiding studying science altogether, because of their fear of organic chemistry.

People are right when they say: “you can’t wait until the last minute to try and cram and learn O chem.” It doesn’t work. There is a lot of evidence which shows that we learn better when force ourselves to access information more frequently throughout extended periods. And this is especially true with subjects like organic chemistry: courses which require you to synthesize vast bodies of knowledge and apply them in new ways to solve challenging problems.

When I first started studying organic chemistry, I purchased the textbook and spent all summer reading it. I even sat in on the summer lectures and absorbed everything I could. I didn’t always understand what the teacher was saying because the summer course moves very quickly and I was also a bit behind in my reading. But struggling to think about the ideas in the class was helpful. And I saw from a unique angle what core ideas were used throughout the entire course and thus would be very useful to know and understand well.

I realized that as with other subjects, it’s not about the number of resources you have available to you, it’s about how resourceful you are. Their resources are there. You can attend the O-chem course the year before you take the class. You can buy ten textbooks online and read them all. You can go to your professor’s office hours. You can find videos online. You can hire a tutor who works with you on an unlimited basis. The resources are all there. What matters is how badly *you* want to succeed. College is different from high school. In high school, the drive didn’t matter as much. You could get by

That being said, if you want to take your chemistry to the next level, we certainly offer organic chemistry tutoring here at Tutor Portland. I (Eric) do this tutoring myself. Since finding a good organic chemistry tutor is so rare, our rates for this are separate from our regular tutoring. Our organic tutoring is billed on a per-hour basis.

Organic Chemistry Tutor Portland Oregon

Having been through Organic Chemistry myself, I think that tutoring is a good option if the subject of chemistry is starting to make you feel stressed or if you are starting to fall behind. But I strongly encourage students to seek help as early as they can because organic chemistry is a very challenging subject to learn. It’s a difficult subject to learn if you only have a handful of days before your exam.

One of the biggest recommendations I make for any learning program is that students invest a little bit of time each day learning and working with the material from a subject. There is a lot of research that shows when students force themselves to access information on different occasions spread out over time, they learn better and have improved recall of the concepts. This is especially true with Organic Chemistry. This subject is no joke. There is a reason why everyone thinks it is so difficult. It earned its reputation for a good reason. You have to start studying early for Organic Chemistry. 

When I first started learning O-Chem I spent my summer studying the subject for 1.5 to 2 hours every single day. Before the course even started in the fall, I had already spent nearly 200 hours studying the subject.

My attitude was this: I don’t want to *just* earn an A in this course. I don’t want to *just* be top of my class. I want my professor to say, “this is the best organic chemistry student we have seen in fifty years.” And my work ethic backed this up.

That’s the type of work ethic and attitude I will bring to our tutoring sessions. I don’t just want you to pass organic chemistry. I want you to dominate the subject. And that is certainly possible. It will take a lot of hard work and dedication on your part, though having an experienced tutor can save you hundreds of hours. One key I learned is that some certain chapters and concepts repeat themselves. For example, when I was taking O-Chem II in the summer, I made a note when the professor said, “the acid-base chapter is the most important content in the whole O-chem series. It comes up time and time again. So make sure you know that stuff.” I took note of that and when I read the chapter I invested a lot of time into it.

That’s the way O-chem goes. There are some small concepts you think are nominal and not important. But actually, those might be the most important concepts in the entire course. That’s one reason why it is helpful to have a tutor guiding you in your studies.

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If you want to become a doctor, your future likely rests on your ability to succeed in organic chemistry. Medical schools use this course as a test. They want to ensure that you can handle the rigor of medical school. Organic chemistry requires you to learn, synthesize, and apply vast quantities of knowledge and countless interweaving concepts. Having someone to help you is a *huge* advantage. If you’d like to schedule a session, please contact me personally: eric@mentorportland.com.

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