Warning: I normally try to avoid venting about my problems online these days because I’ve found that it’s unfair to push them onto people that I’m trying to entertain. But since a burning anger of a thousand exploding suns fueled the creation of this comic, I think this may be one of those occurrences where it may be appropriate. But if you don’t want to here me rant, by all means don’t read on please please share in my pain.

Organic Chemistry is the worst thing ever conceived by man.

click to see

This is the book. This is the book that I have re-named The Necronomicon because it is slowly driving me insane as I read it. The book I have read 896 condensed grueling pages for and am still not done. Because it will never end.

Never end.

Each page is a jamboree of incomprehensible babble that felled a tower of the same name by managing to transcribe the wailing and gnashing of teeth into written form. The black ink that draws every curved arrow is adder venom and the red ink that marks every one of my incorrect answer is taken from the blood of my own wounds. Because I have suffered wounds in this war. And yet I continue to fight. For the next battle already looms around the corner.

But perhaps I’m not being clear. Let me tell you exactly what Learning Organic Chemistry entails:

Organic Chemistry - Lectures - Semester 1:

1. Be reassured by your Professor that Organic Chemistry isn’t as hard as everyone says it is.
2. Fail the course.
3. Come back the following year and get a Professor who jokingly comments that you may have to study 5 hours a day for this course. And it will be true.
4. Start studying a course where each chapter is not self contained. Each chapter has a different set of rules that need to be studied and understood completely in order to get the next chapter. Normally, in Chemistry and Biology, if you’re having trouble with one chapter and don’t quite get it, you can make it up by doing well on the following chapter. Not in Organic Chemistry. Because each chapter is a set of rules in a game of life or death. And every chapter is a new round to the game, where the rules from the previous chapter still apply to the ones you’re learning now. The textbook being divided into chapters is a joke. The first semester of Organic Chemistry is really just learning the most basic of rules so you can understand the various reactions you’ll be memorizing for the next chapter. Only you’re not asked the most  basic of questions. Oh no.
5. When you get to a test, apply what you’ve learned on practice problems and through examples in order to answer the questions. Only the questions will either be five times more complex than what you’ve learned in class or be on something you haven’t learned yet.
6. Learn to read the Professor’s thought patterns and take 2 more tests and a final.

Organic Chemistry - Lab - Semester 1:

1. Do tedious paperwork written in a style that suggests you’ve already done the lab before you do each lab.
2. Carry out the experiment and understand it. <— Actually the easiest part but only worth 10% of your grade.
3. Write your results in an obscure format that no other scientists use but your Professor seems to think is the only way to write a paper. Only he won’t tell you what that format is. He expects you to hand in your papers and get them marked down for not following his train of thought, you to read through them, and slowly over several weeks discern the format he has in mind. Of course he’ll change the rules just a teeny bit every week in order to keep you on your toes.
4. Take two tests that are in the same spirit as the Lecture tests.

Organic Chemistry - Lectures - Semester 2:

1. Get an entirely new Professor who will force you to take the same damn course with an entirely different train of thought and who openly admits that he’s not very good at teaching.
2. Realize that the second course isn’t really about taking basic examples and doing mind bending problems like last time but really just about trying to figure out what exactly the professor is thinking at the moment he says something in class.
3. Listen to him berate Biology majors in the middle of class as he expounds how great Organic Chemistry is and how Biology sucks every few lectures.
4. Curl up and cry.

Organic Chemistry - Lab - Semester 2:

1. Be gleeful that you still have the same Professor for this course (even though you hate him), only to curl up and cry again when you realize that he’s decided to change the entire way he teaches a course on a whim.
2. Now, all he does is tell you what kind of reaction he wants you to do and gives you a name for scientific paper. You have to find that scientific paper online in one of the 2 of 5,000,0000 sites that won’t make you pay for it (it changes every time), look through the supplementary material files, find the one reaction that resembles what he wants you to do, and hope it’s the right one as you write down the procedure for it. When I told my tutor about this he was shocked because he’s never had to do this and he’s in graduate school.
3. Of course, he never actually tells you how much you’re supposed to make. You won’t actually be told that until the day of class. So every day when you walk into lab you need to get the amounts and do about a half hours worth of calculations so you can get the mass, moles, and equivalents of every reagent for the experiment. Of course you’re under pressure to do this as fast as possible because the experiment will probably take from 1:30 to 5:30 on a good day and you need get it done as fast as possible before the lab closes and you’re forced to quit early and take a point penalty on your lab.
4. Once you obtain your results, you need to continue playing the format game with your professor as you type up your lab report.

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