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Oct. 31, 2009 11:02 a.m. cxhb Reader

Monkeywrench wrote:

I'm in my 3rd (and thankfully last) semester of organic chemistry, and I'm not even a chem major.

People that hold degrees in chemistry have a ton of respect from me. I can't think of a single thing that I've tried that is harder. Math for the most part makes sense, it's all logic based. Physics is math with meaning, but chemistry? holy crap.

A good professor makes all the difference in the world.

lol I know exactly what you mean. Chemistry is solely theory based. You just have to trust it. You cant see half of this crap happen...

I give respect to them as well. The professor I have now is of course incredibly smart. She actually is a really interesting person as well, shes traveled ALL OVER the world... and organizes the study abroad program in Luxembourg Germany. Sadly I just dont think shes that great of a teacher. Or im not a good learner lol
Oct. 31, 2009 11:41 a.m. Capt Slow Reader

Teachers do make all the difference. I was happy that the chemistry department at SJSU was exelent...

I used www.ratemyprofessor.com pretty frequently to try to identify and avoid the bad profs. YMMV
Oct. 31, 2009 11:42 a.m. mtn SuperDork

BTW.... http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/

It will help BIG time.
Oct. 31, 2009 11:42 a.m. mtn SuperDork

I was too slow
Oct. 31, 2009 11:43 a.m. Capt Slow Reader

hey mtn I guess great minds think alike!!!
Oct. 31, 2009 12:03 p.m. Giant Purple Snorklewacker Dork

Chemistry is hard stuff and without a good teacher its near impossible. I'd get a tutor who is a teacher first and a chemist second like maybe a local High School chem teacher.

Failing that - IIRC Hess mentioned taking it at a CC in the evening the semester before you take it for real at your engineering school so you are prepared already (assuming they won't transfer the credits).

I might suggest "other" solutions like having someone else impersonate you or maybe offering the professor his life in exchange for a passing grade but... engineers need to know enough chem to understand materials... and engineering courses ain't going to get easier as you get closer to the end. Gotta be able to tough it out.
Oct. 31, 2009 12:06 p.m. mtn SuperDork

Capt Slow wrote:

hey mtn I guess great minds think alike!!!

Clearly
Oct. 31, 2009 12:37 p.m. cxhb Reader

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote:

Chemistry is hard stuff and without a good teacher its near impossible. I'd get a tutor who is a teacher first and a chemist second like maybe a local High School chem teacher.

Failing that - IIRC Hess mentioned taking it at a CC in the evening the semester before you take it for real at your engineering school so you are prepared already (assuming they won't transfer the credits).

I might suggest "other" solutions like having someone else impersonate you or maybe offering the professor his life in exchange for a passing grade but... engineers need to know enough chem to understand materials... and engineering courses ain't going to get easier as you get closer to the end. Gotta be able to tough it out.

I have no time for a tutor, otherwise i would have one now lol i wish i did... and i know engineering courses are going to be harder as i go on, but thats fine by me. at least they are the reason i am in school. That and every engineering course ive taken so far has been enjoyable and the professors are great. Even struggling through manual part programing before cnc control, I loved it. and the professors are more than helpful. In chemistry, not so much...
Oct. 31, 2009 5:38 p.m. M2Pilot New Reader

Many years ago as an undergraduate, I made every possible grade in Chemistry. At the time I could have taken 1 more chem. course & had a BA in Chem,that course plus German as foreign language would have given me a BS in Chem. Didn't even consider it.
Oct. 31, 2009 6:31 p.m. Xceler8x Dork

I was forced to take Chem as an I.T. major.

As in computing. I sure use that knowledge everyday of my life...like when I'm sweetening my tea at lunch.

But hey...as long as your paying that poor school for every credit hour...it's worth it. Believe me. Being well rounded never paid the bills so well. I mean the college's bills. Like to tenured professors who never have to make a honest living again.
Oct. 31, 2009 8:25 p.m. RedS13Coupe Reader

The thing about chemistry that really sucks (or at least how it seemed to me) is that there is a lot to learn before you can have it start to make sense.

Almost like math, where you have to spend arithmetic, geometry, algebra, algebra 2, and trig just learning how it functions before you can really start to see how it works and how it is applied.

It is like with chemistry you need the stuff you learn later on to make the stuff you learn at the beginning make ANY sense... until you start to see how the different orbitals and oxidation states really work, why atoms bond, ect. its all just +1's and -2's.

You start out just being forced to memorize random basics that you must accept as fact and commit to memory because you don't know enough chemistry to make sense of any of it.

Stick with it, make flash cards, memorize the E36 M3 out of everything they tell you and at some point it WILL explain itself.
Nov. 1, 2009 12:15 p.m. Xceler8x Dork

RedS13Coupe wrote:

You start out just being forced to memorize random basics that you must accept as fact and commit to memory because you don't know enough chemistry to make sense of any of it.

..and that's my point. Why learn this stuff if you aren't going to be a chemist? If you have an interest that's one thing. But is a marketing professional ever going to need to know the basics of covalent bonds?

It's a money grab in my opinion.
Nov. 1, 2009 12:21 p.m. cxhb Reader

Xceler8x wrote:

RedS13Coupe wrote:

You start out just being forced to memorize random basics that you must accept as fact and commit to memory because you don't know enough chemistry to make sense of any of it.

..and that's my point. Why learn this stuff if you aren't going to be a chemist? If you have an interest that's one thing. But is a marketing professional ever going to need to know the basics of covalent bonds?

It's a money grab in my opinion.

Yeah it is. Colleges are service industries. They are NOT in it for the betterment of anyone. That's just a hopeful byproduct. SOME professors are in it for the betterment of others, but for the most part, Colleges are just another "industry".
Nov. 1, 2009 1:16 p.m. SkinnyG Reader

College is a hoop you need to jump to get your smart papers.

You get good instructors and you get bad instructors - just like you get good employers and bad employers.

What YOU do with your education is up to YOU. Make sure YOU do something about it.

In today's "information age" you should have no problem finding the resources to help you through the course. Communicating in a productive and respectful manner with your Instructor can go a long way in helping yourself - and it may make the Instructor more aware of the needs of his/her students (though, of course, it may not - but YOU need to try something).

College is a hoop - jump it/play the game/do what you need to do to get through.
Nov. 1, 2009 7:26 p.m. JoeyM Reader

FWIW, I would tell most students to steer clear of new profs who are fresh out of grad school. It takes time to learn how to teach properly, and nobody wants to be the guinea pig for a new prof. I know that I got better at teaching as I gained experience, and I can't think of any teacher who with a different story.....

Duke wrote:

One thing I will say is that I have seen this a hundred times: people who do well in high school, without trying, take a bath in college. College is an entirely new game compared to high school.

+1,000,000

This is entirely true. I think that school gets more difficult at each level[1], and that the people who haven't had to really WORK for a grade may not be prepared for a difficult class. I know I was not. I'm convinced that if you continue the education game, you'll eventually find a level where it becomes difficult....much more difficult than you ever imagined classes could be.

I didn't think High School took any effort, and didn't find most of my undergrad classes to be particularly taxing. There was an Embryology class that kicked my butt, though. I'm glad, too......if I hadn't taken that class and learned what it meant to really WORK to get a grade, I probably would not have survived grad school. The content of the class hasn't helped me a bit, but the discipline has been invaluable.

Anyone can learn something they find useful/interesting. The person who can successfully study something they don't is often much more desirable. This is why many [not all] employers like a well rounded education....it shows that you are willing to knuckle down and learn something that they want you to, and to do what they think you should, regardless of whether or not it is something that you like or find to be valuable.

--

1 - which stands to reason.....the people who didn't do well at the last level are probably not going to be present at the next one; i.e. college is mostly the people who did well in high school. Grad school is mostly the people who did well in college, etc.
Nov. 1, 2009 8:51 p.m. Stealthtercel Reader

If you can't explain the thing you know best to somebody who knows nothing whatsoever about it, then you don't know it as well as you thought you did.

I respect the idea behind academic tenure, but I deeply resent it when it's used as a stick to beat noobs with. A good dept head OUGHT to be saying, "Welcome to this subject! I think it's totally cool, and my objective is to help you understand why I think so, and (ideally) agree with me." A bad dept head will say, "This is what's on the syllabus; try to keep up."

The former is called "transformative education," and it's the way of the future. (Just ask your President.) The latter is called "transmissive education," and it is SO 19th century.

To the OP: if you got those sorts of marks in high school and you're working that hard now, then, trust me, the problem isn't you. Good luck.
Nov. 2, 2009 8:34 a.m. vladha New Reader

This was my biggest gripe about college... professors not having the ability to teach, period. I had to take 4 chem classes, the first two were smaller, hence, more instructive... straight A's. The last 2 sucked my periodic table. 700 plus students in class, with a chinese teacher who could not speak english. The TA's were soooo swamped, you could never get in to see them... still pulled A's, but it was way out of proportion to class time vs other studying needing to get done.

Had another professor teaching operations research. His idea of class time? Reading the frigging syllabus in class... no extra instruction, no questions allowed. When I went to his office for some input, he flat out told me he was just there for research grant money... he didn't have time to teach.

I have at least 100 stories of crap like that, no joke. Higher education taught by people without any clue of how to teach... and you're paying for it.

I have 3 kids in elementary school. The first year I volunteered to help the teacher, got a real good idea of how much time a real teacher puts in to prepare for a class. Since then, I've gotten my own certificate and substitute teach on days off.

Honestly, the attitude some of the professors had about teaching and having to teach... 25 years later, it still burns my britches. What the hell has happened to our universities and could this be a reason why we are slowly losing our technical prowess in the world? Too much money and not enough standards.

Now, I've got to go and beat on something... there's got to be some part on the car that needs to be man handled.

Mark
Nov. 2, 2009 9:36 a.m. NYG95GA SuperDork

Luckily, the various trades/careers I've chosen don't require extensive knowledge of chemistry, but I enjoy knowing things about the world around us, so I've learned just enough to be in awe of it. I see it in a simplistic manner, as if it is just a map of children's building blocks, and how they can be put together (Legos with electron shells?). Once I grasped the basics (yes, it took quite a while), the element chart just blows me away every time I look at it .
Nov. 2, 2009 9:38 a.m. Dr. Hess PowerDork

Freshman Chemistry at TAMU:

The department had a mini computer, which fer you non-IT guys, a mini is one step below a mainframe. This box did only one thing: It generated freshman chemistry exams. They would put in whatever average grade they wanted for all of the students for the semester, like, say, 65% (failing, basically), and the mini would generate tests using statistical models to achieve that average. It even made the tests harder throughout test day, assuming that later period students would look at the tests from earlier in the day. When I took it, all the exams were based on solving a bunch of quadratic equations in a very limited amount of time without a calculator that could solve it for you. Any calculator that could solve a quadratic was banned. Calculators had to be pre-approved by the calculator checker. I took my scientific programmable HP that did not have a quadratic function and derived the solution and programmed it into the HP. When you got to the test, they went up and down the rows and cleared the memory in your calculator. I'd just push the formula back into memory and go on. I taught my wife how to do it with her identical HP. She told her friends. The next semester, there were no more quadratics on the tests. When asked why, the answer was "Someone figured out how to get a non-banned calculator to solve a quadratic."

The professor I had in the chemistry zoo class (300 students at a time) was German and kept telling stories about how they did things back in Germany "before the war." He had the lecture notes from the course head on transparancies. He'd put a transparency on the overhead, read it to himself saying "Is this right? Is this right? Humm...." then read the transparancy to the class of 300 and ask "Any questions?" One day he lit off some thermite in class as a demonstration. That was pretty cool. Didn't help survive the insane exams though. Half way through the semester he was arrested for masturbating in the school swiming pool. We got substitute instructors after that.
Nov. 2, 2009 9:42 a.m. Dr. Hess PowerDork

Oh, and you want to know what you need to know of Organic Chemistry to be a doctor/go through medical school? NOT A BERKELEYING THING. Zip, nada, nothing. It is somewhat interesting in that when they mention some molecule name, you can say, oh, I could probably draw that. That's it. All that synthesis and everything else is nothing but a way to keep you from applying to medical school.

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