Ma'am,
I have some questions about synthesis problems. There are so many reactions to think of when doing these problems, what shouls be our starting point? I did well on the second quuz, but I was not confident when I saw it in from of me. I do study and read the book. Many times it feels overwhelming when I see the reaction, I don't know where to start. Any tips?
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Here is what I do:
ReplyDelete1. Count the number of carbons in both the product and starting material.
2. If you have to add carbons, think about how you might do that. Right now your only options are to deprotonate a terminal alkyne and then add an alkyl halide
3. Think about the function groups. i.e. if the product has a ketone, think about ways you know how to make a ketone.
In truth, I usually work both forwards and backwards (retrosynthesis) until thinks fall into place, and then double check everything at the end.
Dr. Peterson gave a really good answer, thats the right way to solving a synthesis problem and there are a few thing I would like to suggest and these are:
ReplyDelete1. You can make a page of reactions, include their reactants, products and especially reagents. I am a visual learner and I like to see everything infront of me.
2. go back to chapter 4 and make sure you know what every reagent does, there are a lot of reactions in chapter 4.
3. Know how reagents affect Stereochemistry.
4. Do a lot of problems and that will make the synthesis more familiar and it will be easier to generate the intermediates and products.
5. Also you can use notecards for the different reactions.
6. One thing I like about synthesis is they are like a maze you can take different routes to get to the end, so it is nice to come up with a different way to synthesize a product and it is right.
I hope that helps a little bit and good luck
Everybody's answers are awesome (and I usually do most of them) however, I wanted to point out that practicing really does help in this case. Our book has a lot of very helpful problems to practice and I am sure it wouldn't be too difficult to find more practice online if need be.
ReplyDeleteSomething that might help you as well would be to find friends in our class and practice the problems with them, and then discuss how to solve them. I tend to do practice problems with two other people and, in the event that we disagree, we argue our cases, discuss, and then look at the correct answer. This way, everybody can be on the same page and you can see which mistake trends (or successful ones) your thought process falls into.
I hope this helps!