===Organic Chemistry===
It seems hard for me to imagine this page to be complete without listing one of William's most painful classes. Organic Chemistry takes two semesters to complete, and is taken the spring of one year, followed by the fall of the next. So, even stucturally the class is difficult, but I'll get to that in a bit. The first semester of Organic (Shortend to orgo here, and o-chem at most other schools)is basically learning the bare-bones basics of organic chemistry, analogous to learning the alphabet of a new language, and logically the second semester builds on the knowledge creating paragraphs and papers of this alphabet (to continue the analogy). Now notice how I made the jump from alpha-bet to papers over a summer; this is basically how it feels. And, of course, this is not to say at all that learning the basics of organic chemistry is easy. Quite the contrary, the basics are very memorization based, there is no way around it. This memorization becomes even more of a hinderance when you arive the fall of the next semester and realize that you have forgotten everything. Of course, there is hardly a day of review, it would be impossible though to review more, there is far to much material to get into the semester. Thus the first month of that second semester of orgo is really a blind, frantic scramble to remember what the previous semester intailed, while trying to to understand complex reaction mechanisms which apear to happen almost by magic. However, if you can get though that, the rest of the semester should be only regular hard. Of course, this is all in addition to the lab section in which you are given three unknown samples (two of which are mixed together) which you are supposed to purify, analyze, and identify using the methods learned the semester before, and some new techniques as well. Workload-: Bi-weekly problem sets: three hours (usually done over two-four days) Tests (four over the course of the semester)- usually between 10-24 hours of studying Regular reading-1-2 hours (usually two-three reading assignments during the week) Lab prep-1 hour Melt-temp- 30minutes to i hour 30 Lab- 4 hours Lab report- 8 hours or so per report except the third, which is a short work sheet.
