Why Organic Chemistry Is So Difficult For Pre-Med Students 279
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 agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I agree... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I agree... (Score:4, Funny)
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absolutely; pchem is way harder then organic
Re: I agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
absolutely; pchem is way harder then organic
It depends on what you are good at. I thought pchem was easy. Lots of differential equations (which I already knew from math classes), thermodynamics (which I already knew from engineering classes), and lots of quantum mechanics (which I already knew from physics classes). If you have the background, and are good at math, then pchem is easy. But orgo is just lots and lots of memorization. I hated it. However, I have found a knowledge of orgo to be a lot more useful in real life. Anything that is either alive or plastic is orgo.
WRONG! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Well, relatively few of us live in LA.
Physics (Score:3)
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As I understand it, the physics which are potentially of use to a pre-med don't go much beyond "figure out which equation produces the units you want, and rearrange it until it solves the problem for you." That doesn't involve getting an intuitive sense for quantities and thresholds, whereas these skills are forced on you right from the start of reactions in orgo.
You're doing it wrong. The stated methodology (guess, plug, chug) is very ineffective and completely counter to the major reason to require physics courses for non-physics majors (and physics majors for that case.) The (often unrealized) hope is that the student in a physics course will learn to analyze a given situation with an understanding based on overall principles (energy flow, momentum, torque, etc.) decide on the items which are important and which are not and then apply math skills to come up with
Re:Physics (Score:4, Interesting)
Medical students are great memorizers. All of them. Some of them are also smart.
Dad is a professor emeritus of chemistry at a University that includes a medical school. He has a lot of stories about med students who NEEDED and A but couldn't reason for shit. They just didn't get that there was nothing they could memorize that would get them As. Some of them couldn't even plug and chug but somehow got into a 6 year medical program, which implies an A in HS chemistry.
Re: Physics (Score:2)
Re:Physics (Score:4, Informative)
If it's green and slimey, it's biology.
If it stinks, it's chemistry.
If it doesn't work, it's physics.
Re:Physics (Score:4, Funny)
When I was 13, our teacher in woods and metal craft had a sign in the workshop with the text: "Practice is when everything works, and noone knows why. Theory is when nothing works, and everyone knows why. In this room we combine theory and practice, nothing works and noone knows why"
I once put up a slightly modified version of that sign on the office door of one of my profs, changing room for faculty. He was not amused...
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I started out doing a chemistry degree and this was my biggest complaint (I don't know if it was specifically with organic but I think so). There are the rules then there are exceptions to the rules and then there are exceptions to the exceptions. After I dropped out (for unrelated reasons), when I went back, it was for a physics degree and I was much more comfortable with that. Reason, not rote learning.
Congratulations on your Nobel prize! Chemistry is the application of physics to atoms and molecules. If you've found exceptions to the rules of physics as we understand them, surely such a discovery would win you many prizes and much fame.
Chemistry, particularly organic, requires very little rote memorization. Electrons are negatively charged. Any where you have extra electrons is negative, anywhere you have a dearth of electrons is positive. Like charges repel, differing charges attract.
There, 3 sente
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Heh, I was a Biology major, and Gen Chem kicked my ass. The whole time the professor kept telling us this is the worst of the chemistry classes, and once we took him for O-Chem things would get better. He kept baiting us by saying he taught O-Chem via synthesis of various drug compounds (LSD, MDMA, etc.). Shoulda stuck with it...
But it makes sense, then, that as a chem major you found O-Chem the hardest. I found Gen Chem to be no different from a math class (which is my weakest point).
Re:I agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
He kept baiting us by saying he taught O-Chem via synthesis of various drug compounds (LSD, MDMA, etc.).
Heh. I liked that part too. Unfortunately, you start with three tons of acetone and end up with 0.2 grams of cocaine.
But organic chemistry has been nothing more than the crunch course for pre meds. The way it's taught in most places it is just rote memorization. Lots of rote memorization. And med school is little more than that (other than gross anatomy which is rote memorization in a fog of wintergreen-flavored formaldehyde.)
Which is a shame because organic chemistry is interesting in it's own way. However, the intro courses are typically not designed to initiate some love of inquiry and reasoning - they're designed to see how much you can stuff in your brain for a couple of weeks. The end result is lots of doctors who remember broad swathes of oft time trivial facts, but can't figure out basic statistics to save somebody's life.
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can't figure out basic statistics to save somebody's life.
To be fair, most non-statisticians can't figure out basic statistics to save their life. It's a deceptively hard field.
I wrote a one-page stats bible for my residency program called "How to Get Every Stats Question Right on the Anesthesiology Boards". Last I heard, they were still making copies of it six years later.
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The way it's taught in most places it is just rote memorization. Lots of rote memorization. And med school is little more than that (other than gross anatomy which is rote memorization in a fog of wintergreen-flavored formaldehyde.)
Organic chemist here (currently working in drug discovery). During my time in grad school I TA'd ochem courses for both majors and non-majors (pre-meds), and the thing that created the most difficulty for the pre-meds was that they tried to learn the material simply through rote memorization. The problem with this is that there's simply too many reactions in organic chemistry to try to memorize each and every one of them with all the details. Because of this, the way most professors (that are any good) teac
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First year * is the hardest because you have to listen to the bitching of all the future washouts that don't have the maths for real science.
Seriously, your prof wasn't being completely honest. It only gets easier because you're used to it.
Re:I agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
In many respects, its unfortunate that chem majors (I was one, too) take O-chem alongside pre-med students.
The most useful aspect of O-chem is learning to interpret the various spectroscopic results used to characterize organic compounds (particularly NMR spectra). This information is quite useless, however, to those who are not chem majors. We instead spend an inane amount of time learning hundreds of chemical reactions that neither the pre-meds nor the chem majors really need to know.
Even then, the course doesn't have to be as difficult as it's made to be, which I finally figured out the first time I taught organic chemistry. We simply make it that difficult to weed students out. Many students who probably would have made fine chemists saw their chemistry careers end in Organic II---all in the name of convincing a lot of pre-meds that they were never going to become doctors.
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We simply make it that difficult to weed students out.
I detest that approach, particularly when it involves something as meaningless and pointless as brute force memorization. If you want to weed out students, teach important topics to an advanced degree. Jumping though hoops is for seals. Your criticism has great credibility since you taught the subject.
Re:I agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a certain perverse logic in using Organic I and II to weed students out.
They're sophomore-level courses. They're also the most difficult two-course sequence all pre-med/pre-vet/pre-pharmacy students will collectively take during their first two years. Pre-med students outnumber the openings in medical school by at least 10 to 1. They must be weeded at some point. The sooner you weed them out, the sooner those students can stop wasting their time and tuition money on a course of study they will never complete.
I'm not sure I agree with it, but that's the logic as it was explained to me.
Re:I agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, as a chemistry major who decided to go to med school when I was a senior, I think it would be better still if we went to British-style medical education. The needs of physicians and chemists are different enough that they should be taught in separate classes. As a trivial example, doctors don't need to know that Grignard reagents exist. As others point out, spending that time on a rigorous education in statistics would serve them much better.
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We'd be doing far better if we just weeded people out just because they can't cut it at the job, rather than because they are not in the top 10% of their class. Just train more people, and have supply and demand do its thing, instead of leaving things to organizations that want the supply of doctors to be low.
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And what exactly happens to all of those "doctors" with $400,000 student loans who now cannot work as doctors?
If we used your approach, no doctor would ever be able to secure a student loan again. The risk of default would be astronomically high. The only difference is that now the lenders would be the ones choosing who gets to become a doctor.
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And what exactly happens to all of those "doctors" with $400,000 student loans who now cannot work as doctors?
They default and their lenders take a bath. And yes, I think the exclusion for student loans should be taken out of bankruptcy law.
Re:I agree... (Score:4, Insightful)
If more med schools open or expand to train more doctors, prices should fall. That accomplished, more doctors might actually create competition for patients (when is the last time you heard of a doctor not new to the area doing anything to attract new patients). For that matter, when is the last time you went to the doctor, found an empty waiting room and were told to go right back? Or called to set an appointment and were told any day is fine, morning or afternoon.
This is one (of many) reasons healthcare is unaffordable in the U.S.
I disagree Re:I agree... (Score:2)
I absolutely suck at memorization, so what I did was learn the why of the reaction - which generally was just geometry based (which part of the electron cloud was physically easiest to access - ie steric hinderance); charge based (which atom most 'wanted' the electrons') and energy based (which configurations would be energetically stable with minimum strain and best sharing of electrons).
For my O-chem final - my brain almost completely forgot all of the standard reactions, but I was able to reconstruct rea
Re: I agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just the fact that they call it "orgo" tells me it's weird. Where does the second O come from?
Frustration. You can't scream a "g" in frustration. Try orggggggggggggggggggggggggggg as opposed to orgooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
It's similar to Khannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn versus Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.
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Yeah, this. I've never heard it called orgo. In fact, this description of the class does't ring any bells with me at all.
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Just the fact that they call it "orgo" tells me it's weird. Where does the second O come from?
Where does the 'o' in "won't" come from?
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It comes from the "o" in "would," even though it is as often used as a stand-in for "will not." We just don't have a separate contraction (i.e. wiln't)
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But the contraction for "would not" is "wouldn't".
Re: I agree... (Score:5, Informative)
That is incorrect. It has nothing to do with "would", but rather an alternative form of "will" which was "wol", quite common in Middle English (Chaucer uses it a lot).
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Won't is short for Wollnot, woll now being an obsolete and archaic form of will.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woll [wiktionary.org]
Re: I agree... (Score:5, Funny)
Judging from the topic I'd guess from a substitution of ammonium nitrate and its acid group with oxygen.
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. o O (and these people wonder why they have trouble with chemistry... tsk, tsk...)
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College too hard? (Score:3)
Re:College too hard? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, he has no clue what Bayes' theorem is, or how it is relevant to his decisions. If I'm seeing a doctor who's evaluating me for an angioplasty vs Lipitor, I damn well want someone who understands Bayes' theorem and has a good intuitive handle on probability, not someone who can sketch complex molecules.
Re:College too hard? (Score:5, Informative)
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Stats pre-calculus is simply memorize and regurgitate. Med students love that. Without a good understanding of calc you don't have the math to really get statistics.
Unless they can fit real (not the for business majors variant) calculus into med school we're going to have to live with limited understanding for most doctors.
Which should be fine. Radiologists and researchers are obviously different.
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The purpose of O-chem for medical students is to give them a fundamental understanding of bonding behavior of organic compounds so that they can later extrapolate that knowledge to biochemical processes.
The lack of proper training in statistics for the vast majority of physicians is a completely separate problem.
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Until last year I was a member of a medical school admissions committee (I have since changed institutions). The point you raise about med students not understanding statistics is true and is being addressed on a nationwide scale. Statistics are being further integrated into the MCATs and many medical schools are requiring it as a pre-requisite for admission. Furthermore, curriculum are changing at the medical school level to ingrain statistics into coursework. That said, the level of statistics that a phys
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Well, where does it end? University? Dumb it down...
Problem is, sooner or later you get confronted by reality and it refuses to bend over and get easier just 'cause people are too stupid to comprehend it. And this is generally where the system breaks down because at one point in life people should stop being on the receiving end of information and start producing some themselves (whatever that "information", i.e. creation of order, may be now, be it research or production). If education fails to produce tha
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Grades are about quality control, if that's what you mean. Some students simply don't know the material that we teach them, and it would be unfair, stupid, and reckless to testify otherwise.
(I know it's not what you mean, but you're clearly an idiot, so I don't really care.)
Wasn't that difficult when I went through it (Score:3)
Or maybe it's just me. I found physical chemistry more challenging.
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Indeed. So much so that I switched to mathematics in my senior year (well, that plus I had basically already completed the math requirements and I had terminal Senioritis).
Re:Wasn't that difficult when I went through it (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is the AMA and the government control the number of residency spots. So if you get more applicants you don't get more doctors, they just make the testing harder. Doctors like this because it creates an artificial "doctor shortage" and keeps their wages up.
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Interesting - you're not the first chem major to say that here. I wasn't a chem major, and never took orgo, but in my basic chem I always found P-Chem both the easiest and most interesting. Probably belies my physics orientation. Everything else in chem, even short of orgo, always seemed like too much memorization, which I always sucked at. Probably why I liked physics, math, and engineering classes - nothing to memorize. Oddly though, I also like history, but the stuff you have to remember is easier for me
Re:Wasn't that difficult when I went through it (Score:5, Informative)
P-chem is difficult because it's students' first immersion into quantum mechanics.
You learned the sanitized version of quantum in gen chem---all those rules about electron configurations and the funky shapes of atomic orbitals. But you simply memorized it. In P-chem, you were confronted with the actual wavefunctions from which all of that stuff is derived. If you've never seen a wavefunction or eigenvalue before, it's a total mind trip. And virtually nobody has encountered such things prior to P-chem.
And then you learn that, once you move beyond a one-electron atom, must of the equations become impossible to solve. And now you must introduce a series of assumptions and limitations to arrive at any solution whatsoever. And that's when the goo starts oozing out of your ears.
Somewhere at the end of it all, you realize that chemistry and theoretical physics are not distinctly different subjects.
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My 'Intermediate Modern Physics' (not all that different from P-Chem) prof held class once a week at a campus bar.
Tensor notation still makes me thirsty.
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The average citizen in the street may think so, but that's not saying anything.
As for physics, it doesn't make people smart to study physics, it just tends to attract some of the smartest students. Having pre-meds major in physics wouldn't make them any smarter.
OChem isn't learned by logic or intuition (Score:2)
Re:OChem isn't learned by logic or intuition (Score:5, Interesting)
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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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 maj
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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.
Re:OChem isn't learned by logic or intuition (Score:4, Insightful)
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A typo, I swear! Whole different thing! Dammit, that's the problem w/ playing pedant.
No memorization ! (Score:3)
Horrors ! What's a premed to do? Surely they don't expect them to actually understand something?!?
Article is exactly wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
As a fellow chemist -- one that has done research and teaching in physical and organic realms -- I assure you this is not necessarily true. A good organic course will yield a maximum grade of maybe 70% for students who are impeccable memorizers but not problem solvers. (I'd say it'd be about 50% for a good phys chem course, because plug-and-chug formulas can certainly be crammed.)
For example, syntheses are a lot like chess. They require memorizing a variety of transformations, but the potential applicat
Chemistry major weighing in... (Score:2, Informative)
(Actually I switched to Math in my senior year).
Organic Chemistry was a breeze compared to Physical Chemistry. Just my opinion.
As the son of two medical doctors ... (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, confidence is a requirement for the job. An indecisive doctor is a shitty doctor.
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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.
Re:As the son of two medical doctors ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Half true (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
org chem is like a cookbook (Score:2)
It's a (big) bunch of rules and exceptions on how to mix 'ingredients' together.
So if you can let lose of all the 'but why?' questions and just follow the recipe, you'll do great.
That wasn't me, though. I've never really got the hang of it, although I love science, so I was happy to leave all those carbon rings behind after high school.
Pre-Med Orgo Requirement (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pre-Med Orgo Requirement (Score:5, Interesting)
Orgoanic chemistry is looked at as a weed out class.
Yup. As someone who both attended classes with and later taught pre-meds, I had an immediate gut reaction to the article title: "maybe because so many pre-med students are retards?" Seriously, after seeing some of the people who wanted to be doctors, I've never been able to fully trust the medical profession. Like some of the other posters, I thought orgo was relatively easy, and I've always felt that anyone who found it an impossible obstacle had no business making decisions about other people's health.
Walter White (Score:5, Funny)
Have Walter White teach it.... where do I sign up?
Doctor's perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Time or difficulty? I say time. (Score:2)
Well the text books don't help (Score:2)
Lot of reductionist comments missing the point (Score:2)
Organic chemsitry is not a fascinating subject in its ownright. And even though it falls in the purview of physics -- like, uh, everything -- it is best understood apart from physics, as a unique lense. Just as biology is not best understood as complicated chemistry, but rather as a completely different perspective.
It demonstrates the raw power of abstraction. For example, ask an experienced organic chemist to propose a synthesis of any arbitrary molecule. A good one will normally be able to come up wit
What "holistic review" really means (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Another doctor's perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Solving organic chemistry problems is one of those things supercomputers and massively distributed projects are set up for.
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When the brightest student in my organic chemistry class can only get about 60% of the answers correct on the first exam, that should tell you they are teaching the subject matter poorly.
That's SOP for orgo (not 1st hand experience I admit), but why should people be able to get anything approaching a 100% on a test? Orgo or not, it means the ability to test how well a student understands the material is difficult because the detection curve is compressed towards the top. It also favors being able to regurgitate or recalculate what you've been shown, as opposed to really testing how well you know a subject. Give students problems that are so challenging that they're unlikely to get all of it
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No, it's to get every student to do as well as they can. The best schools, especially in the early grades, work on that. Kids doing well don't need as much help as those who are not. However, it doesn't mean everyone has equal capability, regardless of how hard they work or how good the teaching.
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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.
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Well, ....until you come to measure it.
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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 l
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Pre-med students need straight As or they change majors.
Obligatory xkcd reference (Score:2)
http://xkcd.com/435/ [xkcd.com]
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