Study Tips

Organic is a hard class in general and Organic 2 is going to be harder because we have more reactions know and understand. In Organic 1, it is already hard because I have to put out a lot of time for this class to learn the mechanisms. My teacher said that Organic 2 is going more difficult because we have to know ten times more information than the mechanisms in Organic 1. I want to develop some study tips that can be helpful for me and may be for you too.

1. Attend the lecture: This is a must because the teacher would explain everything out clearly for you step by step so you can understand it better.

2. Read the materials before coming to class: If you read the book and go over the notes from the lecture slide, you can develop question that you don't understand to ask the teacher in class.

3. Do the sapling homework and the problems in the book: Practice those problems can help you with the quiz and the test. Before the test, you can look over the sapling home works and the problems that you done to make sure that you understand everything. You should take about 2 hours every day to work on this class because this class takes lots of time. There for, making a schedule to work on the problems every day is a good idea.
For the problems in the book, I would do about 10 questions without looking at the answers. After seeing the answers, I would go over the questions with a friend to help me understand what I did wrong.

4. Make a summary page of all the materials you have learned once you done with a chapter. This is the most helpful thing for me in Organic. I would be ready for the materials and when I need to go over things before the test, I can just look at the summary and understand everything. This is also helpful for me when I am doing the practice problems because when I need to look back at a mechanism or something, I can just look through the page and find it right away.

5. Making flash cards is also a good way to study: I did not try to making flash cards last year but a friend of mine did it and she did really well in the class. I think I would try to follow her example too.

6. This is the most important thing: have a good sleep and a good breakfast before taking the test. Everybody knows that they need to have a good sleep and eat healthy meals everyday but not many do it. I think Organic is really stressful for some people, like me, so people would skip meals and/or not having enough sleep because they want to set out more time to study. Or some people like to cramp in everything before the test. Well that is not good for you and the test. I know this because I have done it before. When I went in my Organic class for my exam with an empty stomach and not enough sleep, I looked at the test and it took me a while to understand just one problem and I did poorly on that exam too. Now, I would always try to eat healthy and sleep at least 6 hours for us college student.

These study tips can also apply to other classes. My goal is to do well in Organic and other classes. I hope this would help you all in your classes also. Good luck everyone.