danielofthesaints;3864305 said:
Appreciate this. They refer to the first two chem classes as Gen Chem 1 & 2 here. Then its Ochem 1&2, biochem, inorganic chem, and physical chem thereafter. Our Gen Chem 1 class weeded our class size from 800+ students to 500+ students, and I'm sure this current semester of Gen Chem 2 will do its proportional job as well. When you are talking about "roadmaps", does that have any relation to reaction mechanisms, elementary reactions, chemical equilibrium, activation energy, catalysts that I'm learning right now?
Doesn't have anything to do with it at all, which is like saying knowing what the letter "b" looks like won't help you win a game of Jeopardy. It's larger picture stuff. Equilibriums are of little use in organic, and really only get picked up again in Polymers, on my end since I didn't take biochem. We had O 1 and 2, Quatitative Analysis, I forget the next two, Biochem as an option, and then Polymers.
The others are important, but only as bricks to build the wall. There will be instances where the catalysts are important such as a WCl or phosgene, both of which can be workhorses when paired with other constituent elements as the catalysts. Other times it will be heat or interfacial surface area that act as the catalyst for a system.
Mechanisms are important, but there are so damn many ways to put things together, that you end up missing the forest for the trees.
Activation energies are usually givens in upper chemistries. It's too basic to worry about that when putting together a compound where the two base compounds take two weeks to formulate. More often you'll be worried about propagation rate constants, how much energy does it take for the reaction to go at its optimum efficiency without producing unwanted side effects.
Roadmaps are literally, start with a basic chemical such as 1 methyl, 4 ethyl octanol and get to something else with different constituent groups. It's just a little part of the learning curve when it comes to Hexane. You'll be hitting more types of reactions and how to put things together in Organic 2, such as Nuecleophillic Aromatic Substitutions, which they might tell you is hardly used, but becomes huge again in polymers, and in biochem in certain reactions.
A good example of a roadmap is learning what can be kicked off during a reaction when your putting together something. Water as a by-product is useless and costs money to dispose of. No bueno. Rework the reaction, and you get HClO as a by-product, well then you can package that as a industrial grade solvent. Making money on both ends of that equation, so to speak.
You're getting exposed to a lot of things that might not be seen again for two years. Lewis Acid/Bases will pop up again down the road in a big way.
NAS chemistry, cationic reactions versus mechanisms of anionic reactions, free rad chemistry, ionic versus covalent bonding, electophyllic substitution, ring alkylation, hydride abstractions, ring alkylation. <-----that's all on page 209 of my intro polymer book. Every bit of it.
There's just so much of it out there that it's like me trying to tell you what's in the encyclopedias of the world, and you're just starting to learn the alphabet. Some things your professor will tell you aren't that important, then you hit biochem and learn that some of it is incredibly important in basic plant photosynthetic pathways. Same with NAS and free radical. Some of it is not worth a damn unless you're in aerospace, then you're surrounded by 15 PhD's who spend their entire lives working on free rad living systems, which doesn't mean they're "living" in any respect to biology.
Its one of those things that you don't know how much you don't know, and you won't know what you need to know until you get to where you need to know it. Suffice it to say, there isn't anything, not one single thing, that isn't important in Organic. Even the degrees of seeming importance get skewed depending on which biology and chemistry courses you take. Learn it like you'd learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and algebra. Stuff will pop up all over the place.
I will say this, in addition to the math giving me fits at the beginning of the semester, my lost knowledge of organic was killing me the first two weeks. I bought the book for organic 1 and 2 and reread a lot of it. The new version of the organic book has chapters that the old one doesn't.
The science grows, daily.
The Nobel Peace Prize in Chemistry goes to Polymer Science research more often, I believe, than any other single branch of chemistry. You could literally be put in a lab at Dow, given a few dozen books to look through, and start building new compounds with real world applications every single day. Basically what my professor does.
