This is a course in Organic Chemistry. YIKES! Isn?t that the killer course that sophomores around the world dread? Why are they teaching it to us, students taking our first chemistry course? How will we survive?

Don?t panic. Yes, organic is the course that sophomores around the world dread, although if you press further you will discover that once they got into it, a surprising number of them liked it. No, it is not a killer course. It used to be, when it was taught as an exercise in memorization, but these days most courses are taught with an emphasis on understanding what is going on, and if you approach it in that way, you will discover that everything fits together so neatly there is little need for memorization. Molecules usually do what makes sense, and if you learn to think the way they do, their choices will make sense to you too. You are getting this as a first course because your teachers have come to the conclusion that organic is a more sensible way to begin your college-level chemistry than the traditional rehash and amplification of high school chemistry. I hope that by the time you finish this course, you will agree.

Few of you taking this course intend to be chemistry majors. Most, I suspect, are taking it because you have to, because it is required for medical or some other professional school, or simply as a prerequisite for some course you want to take in another department, perhaps biology. Organic chemistry is the branch of chemistry most applicable to biology and life processes. Further, it involves only a small subset of the available elements. And understanding organic chemistry does not require a great deal of math. For all these reasons, organic makes a logical starting point on your chemical journey. Further, most of you have not seen much organic chemistry before, so the problem of half the class already ?knowing? the material disappears.

In order to present organic chemistry at the introductory level I have had to remove some of the material traditionally covered in a sophomore-level course. I have also added some material at the front end to make sure you have the background necessary to understand the organic parts. And I have slanted the treatment very deliberately toward students interested in the life sciences. In other words, I am dealing mostly with the organic chemistry relevant to life processes. Thus, in a real sense, this is a treatment of BIOorganic chemistry.

For those of you who are interested in chemistry but not biology, do not despair. This course is a good introduction for you also. You will learn many of the ways that chemistry applies to biology, applications that your peers at other schools may not be getting, and frankly, a great deal of modern chemistry does interface with biology, so this will be good for you. But at the same time you will learn appropriate basic chemistry that can be applied to many other areas of science.