Comment Organic is useful beyond its content (Score 1) 567
I'm currently at PhD student in biological engineering, but as an undergraduate I majored in chemistry and specialized in organic, taking the full sequence of open-registration graduate courses that my school offered.
As a tutor and TA for three years, I can echo the (only partially sarcastic) sentiments of many posters that I encountered a number of nice, well-intentioned people who had absolutely no business being physicians, and were shown that early by organic.
On a more serious note, I believe organic is vital for premed students, as well as for a variety of other basic science students (including many who don't currently have to take it).
The important issue that I don't think many people recognize is that some subjects have value outside their actual factual content, and I think organic is a prime example. I'll be the first to admit that a physician will likely never have to show the electron pushing mechanism for a Claisen condensation or analyze a Hammet plot. Organic's value comes in its structure. Many detractors dismiss organic as a useless collection of rote-memorized facts. The truth is, the students who attempt to tackle organic by pure memorization very rarely succeed to any measurable degree. The only way to master organic is to realize that its hundreds of reactions are all variations on a set of only a dozen or so schemes. Organic is often the first (and sometimes the only) class that teaches students practical pattern recognition and useful data consolidation/categorization.
As a tutor and TA for three years, I can echo the (only partially sarcastic) sentiments of many posters that I encountered a number of nice, well-intentioned people who had absolutely no business being physicians, and were shown that early by organic.
On a more serious note, I believe organic is vital for premed students, as well as for a variety of other basic science students (including many who don't currently have to take it).
The important issue that I don't think many people recognize is that some subjects have value outside their actual factual content, and I think organic is a prime example. I'll be the first to admit that a physician will likely never have to show the electron pushing mechanism for a Claisen condensation or analyze a Hammet plot. Organic's value comes in its structure. Many detractors dismiss organic as a useless collection of rote-memorized facts. The truth is, the students who attempt to tackle organic by pure memorization very rarely succeed to any measurable degree. The only way to master organic is to realize that its hundreds of reactions are all variations on a set of only a dozen or so schemes. Organic is often the first (and sometimes the only) class that teaches students practical pattern recognition and useful data consolidation/categorization.
