Thread: Orgo sux

i've studied like 8 hours a day for the most part for this whole semester... so many reactions to remember. I'm not going to med school, do i really need this class lol. All this studing and i know on the final the professor is going to be like


take a CH3 and make CH3CH2OHCH2CH2-Ar (some f-all molecule)

i guess this post is to see if anyone else suffered threw orgo1/2 as much as i am currently. thank god 3 more weeks and done forever.

I haven't taken organic but I'm really looking forward to it.

Oh, it sounds fun, and on the face of it, being able to make your own molecules is pretty cool, but actually doing it is dull as hell...

For example...

1. Take white powder, weigh out amount, place in RBF
2. Add x mL of solvent to obtain clear solution
3. Take other white powder, dissolve x g in x mL of solvent to obtain x wt% solution
4. Add this solution dropwise to the RBF, while stirring, over 10 minutes
5. Reflux for 3 hours until solution is... still clear... monitoring the reaction by TLC (how annoying)
6. Acid/base workup
7. Filter slightly yellow powder (it's impure)
8. Do column
9. Do TLC of every bloody fraction
10. Recombine product fractions and remove solvent
11. Recrystallise
12. Do NMR, IR, MS, HPLC, anything else you like, and discover it's not the compound you wanted in the first place
13. Start again

Takes a special sort of person to truly enjoy organic I reckon but don't let me put you off!

hey im from the UK so i dont know what your grades and stuff mean, how old are you now.

Im 17 so doing organic chemistry seems to be learning a lot of reactions and mechanisms, but it is fun and is in my opinion "real" chemistry.

Practicals can be quite interesting depending on what you use. example using grignards reagent is fun as it is moy reactive

Grignards are boring, you can't see anything except for a small amount of fizzing. At least inorganic synthesis has awesome colours... 95% of the time if your organic compound is coloured, it's impure!

Pure Organic/Inorganic/Physical doesn't really exist in the real world anymore, except for small-scale activities in academia. By and large Chemistry is split right down the middle with Biochemistry and Materials Chemistry... and of those two Materials Chemistry is the way to go

Hey im an A level student, Grignard is the most exciting thing we're allowed to see =(...

apparently giving students ethers and bunsen burners is a bad thing

There's a load of cool stuff you can do with the chemicals commonly used in schools. A couple of my favourites are... glycerol and potassium permanganate (bit more exciting), ammonium dichromate and, er... fire, and the one with fairy liquid, potassium iodide and hydrogen peroxide that ends up making a ton of bubbles. Even the ol' conc sulphuric acid and sugar has its charm.

Petition your teacher now! :P

Good times...

Originally Posted by Matt Lacey

There's a load of cool stuff you can do with the chemicals commonly used in schools. A couple of my favourites are... glycerol and potassium permanganate (bit more exciting)...

What exactly is the reaction with that one and what does it do? I was just thinking about it and I can't really figure it out...

What exactly is the reaction with that one and what does it do? I was just thinking about it and I can't really figure it out...

Think purple flames.

Yeah, it's basically an oxidation reaction where manganate(VII) is your oxidising agent - the glycerol gets oxidised to water (steam) and carbon dioxide and the reaction is very exothermic... and the purple/lilac colour in the flame is characteristic of potassium salts. You can even take it one step further and do the reaction in solution, where you get a green solution (manganate(VI) ions) and a brown precipitate (MnO₂) and talk about the redox chemistry.

Educational AND visually entertaining

Nice. Thanks.