Rileys Freaky Fridays

instrumental analysis is pretty good;
organic is not bad its just just u dont have anything of daily-life dealing organic chem…i personally dont like physical..analytical is good u get to know stuffs there composition some apparatus it is good…never did biochem may be i study in future im just 17 man…

I’m currently 2nd year biochemistry major. I took organic chemistry 1 last semester and im taking part 2 right now. Organic chemistry is very hard, you need to know MANY reactions. It has lots of diagrams and visual representations when you get to stereochemistry. The hardest part by far was retrosynthetic analysis (going backwards from a product to a reactant and writing all the steps and reactions required). There is like 0 math involved in organic chemistry.

Analytical chemistry was mainly mathematical chemistry. It was all about equations and applying them to different problems (ie redox potentials, titration calculations etc)

I didn’t take the other 2 courses so i can’t talk about it, anyways hope that helps.

Just curious, why are you taking both Orgo I and II at the same time?
You’d think that one would take them consecutively.

In my opinion, organic chemistry is really not as hard as it’s made out to be. Compared to my Thermodynamics class, it was a piece of cake! I had a really helpful cliffnotes type book that helped me alot.
Using that book, I never had to open my actual textbook! That’s how helpful that book was for me.

Physical Chemistry is a rather odd area and you don’t really use it outside of the class. It’s a lot of equations about quantum mechanics.

Analytical Chemistry is, in my opinion, the most annoying class. At my college, the professor started taking off points if your lab results were .01% off the class average results! Material-wise, however, it is probably the simplest of the three. In the beginning we covered a bunch of statistical analysis and then moved on to stuff like acids and bases (which can be confusing).

I’m guessing your Instrumental Analysis class is going to teach you how to use some of the chromotography machines and how to read nmr data. If that’s the case, its not a bad class either depending on how complex the nmr data is. Using carbon and proton nmr is okay, but when they bring mass spec and uv-vis into the equation….ugh.

Well, in any case, your classes could be completely different from mine, but that’s my take on things.