The Summer of Organic Chemistry 2 Plus Musings on Returning to School

I read somewhere that one of the rules of blogging is to never apologize when you haven't posted in a while. Makes sense. Life happens. Sometimes the pace of the happenings gets a bit frenzied.

The second organic chemistry midterm was today. I didn't do as well as I had hoped but two of my four mistakes were preventable if I had checked my work more carefully. I still made a score above both the average and median scores, and my accumulated point total for the quizzes and two midterms remains in the grade range for an A. Not bad for my first technical college course in 21 years.

The subject matter itself is complicated. While my geology training allows me to visualize, and to some degree rotate, three-dimensional objects in my mind, which is a big help in organic chemistry, I am certainly no chemist. But so far our focus has been on alkyls and alkenes, molecules made largely of carbons and hydrogens (...hydrocarbons, get it?) so I find the material interesting as well. And science is science.

What do I mean by that? Well, most sciences are underlain by the same mathematical and first-order physics rules. And most sciences utilize patterns and rules and recipes to pose and solve problems. Once you learn those, you should be able to move around at the college sophomore level in most sciences. It's learning the exceptions to all those rules and patterns that takes you to the level of specialization in a science.

Organic chemistry is no exception. It is a foundation course, like calculus, that presents concepts and patterns that I will need later on in biochemistry. I never really understood the value of calculus when I took it lo these many years ago. It wasn't until I had to apply it when doing my dissertation research and later when working in the real world hat I realized how important it was. If I can do a good job now in organic chemistry, I can focus on the bio part of the biochemistry courses to come--my foundation knowledge will be solid.

I haven't written much about being back in school. The campus of a large university is not an alien landscape, of course. I spent 10 years as a student and much later another two working in that environment as an administrator. There's a rhythm that one quickly falls into when you spend your day in that academic bubble.

I overheard the instructor talking to a couple of other students yesterday and learned that what I suspected was right. A large portion, 30-40%, of students taking the organic chemistry sequence in the summer are repeats who are hoping to get a better grade the second time around. But some are taking it in the summer because it gets the equivalent of an entire year of coursework taken care of in 12 weeks; I suppose I fall into that category because organic chem is a pre-req for some other courses that I need. Still others choose to take it in the summer because they prefer the compressed format. The same material is covered in both the summer and the year-long deliveries but the daily schedule of the summer should, in theory, lead to better learning and retention. It's certainly a messy test of that theory for some of these people.

I am of course the oldest student, although there are also a handful of others who are older than the average 20 years. Not surprisingly, I am older than the instructor too!

I haven't met anybody yet. I am hoping to find a study partner, and possibly a potential lab partner, in the next session of the course, which begins in a couple of weeks, that is, find someone who passed this first four weeks and who is planning to continue on throughout the summer.

There are a few sadly stereotypical characters in the class: sorority girls; athletic types (both male and female); the usual motley back bench crew who come in late and sit in the back, probably to doze. My favorites so far are a pair of American-Asian identical twins. Twinning is rare in Asians, so that certainly attracted my attention. But these two young men are quintessential nerds. Skinny to the point of being gangly, a bit spotty, no tattoos, no "cool" branded clothing or shoes. I've never seen them apart, even on campus. In fact, I've never seen them open their mouths in class, even to each other. I guess they communicate with each other telepathically. I'd like to start up a conversation with them but I'm afraid that, like fawns, they would startle and run away if approached.