Currently in Organic I and I'm struggling to understand what solvents make good bases/nucleophiles and which ones are used for SN2 vs E2. Watched a bunch of videos but I still don't have a good grasp of it, even though the mechanisms and synthesis parts are easy for me.
General O. Chem bitching thread.
Just got back my midterm Orgo II exam with a horrid grade. It's literally memorization at this point isn't it? I miss Orgo I
t. brainlets
I always had this mental model that as bulky bases cause elimination rather than substitution, ordinary bases in polar protic solvent act the same way, making a solvent shell which sterically hinders and prevents it from substituting the electrophile.
"learning" [general] organic chemistry is almost useless and the only way to find out
>what solvents make good bases/nucleophiles and which ones are used for SN2 vs E2
is to carry out many experiments on different substrates
realistically, there's not such thing as "good solvent", it depends on nucleophile used and substrate.
books often say that DMSO and DMFA are the best solvents, but workup may be a hassle if you are working with significant masses, and in some cases they are just too polar. I had once MTBE give the best yields for substitution
t. aced orgo, but found out how useless it is in practice two years ago
literally
>Organic in 3-D Chemistry
fuck you and this picture
When are you nerds going to cook me some meth
soembody post a math version of this meme
Memelet
Any Medfags in here? I'm kinda curious how much of this knowledge I have to retain in my career.
>good bases
weak conjugate acids. more so with negative formal charge
(pyridine, trialkylamines, LDA, hydroxide, tert-butoxide, methyllithium, amide, etc)
>good nucleophiles
readily available lone pairs and lack of steric hindrance
(hydroxide, water, ethanol, halides, methyllithium, ammonia, amide, etc)
a lot of molecules are both good nucleophiles and bases, some are one and not the other, and some are neither. Sorting them into these categories based on general principles is pretty trivial. Methanol does not make a very good base in most cases because its protonated form has a low pka. Try to think about it in terms of stability of products/intermediates/reactants for a given pathway as well as steric effects
Absolutely none of it.
I'm in medical school as well. this guy is correct
are you literally me
Thanks for being part of the problem in today's medical field
>help me doc, I got shot!
>let's analyze the chemical structure of your clotting factors
>help me doc I got shot
>wait sorry I mean nurse because doctors don't do shit anymore
R thee me?
Was chirality covered yet? That was cool. The entire rest of the semester preceeding it was a memorization marathon. Rough.
Veeky Forums idk where to turn. I'm stuck with this online program that is brutal in how you input IUPAC naming.
What the fuck do they want?
N,N-dimethylhexamine is my best answer, but I've tried many combos.
should be N,N-Dimethylhexylamine, your online program is pretty picky.
sigmaaldrich.com
I was good on my answer, and then checking sigma aldrich I found this which confirmed my theory, but that it is just a longer akyl.
sigmaaldrich.com
The answer you gave wasn't accepted.
well fuck that shit then, damn. If you have unlimited tries you can give all these a go:
pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
But I thought that one was the IUPAC accepted.
Well fuck my ass and call me Lachatlier.
N,N-dimethylhexan-1-amine was the answer from that page. I swore I tried that combo.
Lots of people bitching about orgo being irrelevant to their field are often wrong, but IUPAC naming is the one thing that is truly useless
t. chem phd, things need to be named in a way that can be easily communicated between people.
I love chem. O-chem is useful and gives me some drug nerd skills. It can be annoying, but as someone who semi-enjoys it I can see how other students want to kill themselves.
OP here. Pretty sure I got over a 95 on this test, possibly over 100 thanks to the 7 point extra credit for identifying oleic acid and knowing it comes from olives.
That was actually pretty helpful, thanks.
>drug nerd skills
Nice, reading erowid as a teenager was how i got into chemistry in the first place.
why does math have no funny meme's?
"solvent shell" image a good
>t. someone who's never seen a real trauma get worked on
Shits insane. Trauma docs are crazy and 10 of them will just magically appear in the bay if they smell blood.
Because it's a humorless field full of people who are dead Inside.
Brainlet art student who wants to switch major to biology.
Will I be able to learn this or am I fucked?
Your concept of spatial arrangement might give you an edge in visualizing molecules, but stuff like Genetics is going to fuck you pretty hard most likely. That and I can guarantee you aren't used to spending this much time practicing chemistry problems and understanding it past memorization. It takes more work than smarts though, so give it a shot if you are willing to work your ass off.
The whole point of the class is to prove you can catalog and understand large amounts of information rapidly and correctly. If you struggle with organic and think it's all about memorization (besides nomenclature) you should not consider medicine as your career.
No one is going to suddenly jump up from an operating table and scream
>Which is the stronger nucleophile!?
But you're going to need to learn how to hold onto and understand a metric fuckton of information and organic chemistry are literal baby steps towards what medical school requires.
I'm aware of the way med school makes you drink from a firehose. But Organic at least prepares you to learn drug chemistry which is applicable to medicine. But your argument is often touted by Calculus professors as an excuse to take their worthless class. "Hurr it's critical thinking and problem solving!" So is literally every other college science class you pencil neck motherfucker! Fuck calculus and fuck physics 1. /rant
>Brainlet detected
>I want to be a doctor but also know as little as possible
all u need