#also i have to go and suffer through ochem now :(

[notesof-mh]

the daily struggle of trying to get your eyeliner to look even 😔

[happyhemostudies]

ochem (study tips & tricks)

 Hi there! Long time no see. I am officially through my first term of organic chemistry (out of three), and I have gained some tips & tricks to make it a little bit more manageable! (I got a B, and I know that some people on studyblr are happier with an A but a B in my first upper division science is more than I was expecting so I’m happy about it!)

Get a molecular modeling kit!

The beginning portions of ochem ask you to understand nomenclature (naming), functional groups, isomers, and stereochemistry. Functional groups are what I feel like you could maybe muscle your way through without ever seeing it in 3D but for everything else, make sure you use a model! It helps tremendously when you’re trying to learn what molecules look like in space. I lost mine in a box halfway through the term (at the beginning of isomers, rip me) and felt so lost with stereochemistry until I found it again. Make mini models of all your functional groups and learn what they look like. Make cis & trans models. Do what my friends and I did and stick random things together and learn how to name them properly. I got mine from Amazon for about $12 and it was worth every penny.

Preview notes/book before class.

If you’ve ever met me, you know that I’m full of anxiety and hate reading before class because I get anxious when I realize I have no idea what I’m reading. Don’t be me! Realize that reading beforehand can only help you solidify your understanding when you relearn it in lecture! It is totally okay to not know it while you’re reading as you’ve obviously never learned it before. This comes in super helpful because there’s a lot to cover in lecture, lots of diagrams and molecules to draw, and you likely won’t have enough time to write out all of the good book-type words you want to know too.

Watch additional videos.

I would like to tell you the wonders of videos for ochem. Since it’s such a visual course, it is SO much more helpful to learn from a video than a book! Honorable mention for @ TheOrganicChemistryTutor and other ochem videos on YouTube, but the real shoutout goes to @ Leah4Sci on YouTube and at leah4sci.com As my lab partner texted me at 1:14 am the morning of our second exam, “This woman is a godsend.”

Study with a group (and a whiteboard!)

In gen chem I made an awesome group of friends who now suffer through ochem alongside me. You would not believe how helpful it is to study with them, explain hard concepts, and work out problems with other people. We reserve a room in our science library and get to working out problems on whiteboards. Highly highly recommend. Especially if you can reserve a room once a week to go over the week’s materials.

Use colors in your notes.

One of my best friends writes her notes in strictly pencil and as a pen gal, it hurts a little. I cannot keep track of anything at all if it’s written in one color and I smudge pencil really badly as a left-handed human. So, I write in pen and make sure that I have at least a highlighter and one colored pen on hand. The highlighter is to highlight important concepts and circle my nucleophile and electrophile at the beginning and ending of a reaction. The colored pen is to track electron flow.

Attend (and try to enjoy) lab if you’re taking it alongside lecture.

My lab partner is lowkey the best frat boy I have ever met and has always made sure that I don’t have to fly solo in lab like other lab partners have made me do, leaving me with all the work. About half way through the term we no longer worked with partners but we worked together during lab if one of us got stuck and would work on post-lab reports together because the questions were always insane. Lab is an amazing break from lecture and a wonderful way to apply what you’re learning. You’ll also meet a bunch of cool people in lab, and I highly suggest forming study groups with your lab partner or lab bench as you spend so much time together every week. 

Make a second notebook specifically for ochem!

You know how some people manage to make super beautiful notes during class? And if you’re anything like me you’re trying but mostly just scrambling to write down everything? If this rings true to you just know that I wholeheartedly get you. This is your chance to make your notes insanely pretty or colorful while also reviewing! I bought a composition notebook and I take about 2-3 pages to explain ONLY the important stuff from each chapter. This is my “cheat sheet” going into the test and you’ll usually find me looking over it the morning of my exams (because my exams are at 9am :( it’s rough out here).

Hope this helps! Best of luck to those starting ochem and best of luck to those continuing on into their next term/semester of ochem.

[dynamic-instability]

In one of my classes we have to write weekly personal narratives about an experience with illness. This week, mine turned into this. It’s probably too personal, and too... immediate?? to turn in to a professor without cutting out a lot of stuff, but not too personal to post online I guess lol

_____________________________

It’s November again.

In 2009 the lights were too bright. Mid-October one morning I woke up to my dad turning on my lights and it was like having to look into the sun while posing for a photo—my eyes wouldn’t stay open, if I forced them to, they couldn’t stay pointed in one direction, they spasmed and hurt. When the light was dimmed, I still saw double. That morning, I showered in the dark, and I remember being scared. They gave me eyedrops that paralyzed my accommodative muscles. In November my pupils were giant discs and I wore reading glasses over sunglasses to look at the computer, and when it was all said and done, the lights were still too bright, and I still saw double.

In 2011 I was tired. There’s fatigue and then there’s fatigue, I learned that Fall. In May of that year I had pulled two all-nighters in a week, and that was the only other time I’d felt this kind of tired, a sensation in about the 30th hour of the second time where it’s like my brain itched. I once saw someone else online describe it as “nausea, but in your head and eyes instead of in your throat and stomach” and that’s the closest anyone else has come to describing it. By November this was happening more and more often. I remember laying down in the corner of the room during a break of Citywide choir and thinking what the hell is wrong with me? I got a cold the next week, and I thought that maybe that was all it was. It wasn’t.

In 2013 I went to the ER for the fifth time in three months of college, and when I wanted to leave before waiting another couple of hours to eventually see a doctor who would tell me once again that they couldn’t do anything to help me, the woman from student life who was there to drive me back to campus made me call my parents on speaker phone and get their permission to leave before she would turn on the car. I had missed more chemistry labs than I could afford to miss without failing, passed out in a voice lesson, was asked by the director to drop out of choir because watching me was distraction when I looked like I was in pain, and if I passed out it would have ruined the concert for everyone. I remember leaving calculus in the mornings mid-class to go to the bathroom and lay on the floor and cry. I remember not being able to lift my hand off the mattress of my dorm room bed. I withdrew from half of my classes on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, and took the Spring semester off.

In 2014 I had made a promise to myself that I would come back to college full time for that Fall semester just to see if I could do it, and then if I couldn’t I would drop out for good. There was one week where I thought that might be happening. Mid-November. The girls in my dorm had made a fort in the lounge out of sheets and blankets and colorful scarves and I remember laying on the couch through the green-filtered light and feeling the world spin and thinking oh god I still can’t do this. The door opened with a rush of cold air and my friends came in with food for me, since I’d been too sick to go to dinner. They sat with me and helped me with chemistry, offered to type up a paper if I dictated it, told jokes and made me laugh. I took an incomplete in one class, but I passed everything else, just barely scraped through, and came back in January.

In 2015 I just wanted to sleep. I passed out in an elevator and heard familiar voices, concerned voices, as I came to, and I stayed there laying motionless for another minute longer, because as long as I wasn’t awake I didn’t have to keep pushing. I wrote whole pages of completely unreadable ochem notes because my hand wasn’t working any better than my brain, and woke up on the floor and was wheeled out on a stretcher crying. It was dark all the time. My cane slipped on wet leaves and I felt my wrist crunch and there it was, one too many missed organic chemistry labs. I couldn’t stand for an entire choir rehearsal because breathing to sing made me lightheaded. I slept for 16 hours a day. The week before Thanksgiving, I called my mother to tell her I had decided to take another hardship withdrawal, and she sighed. I had applied to transfer schools during my much more optimistic Spring semester and Summer, and the week I left was also the week I found out I’d been accepted.

And so okay now it’s 2019, and it’s October and now November again, semester plan again, dark again. My reading is piling up again, feeling overwhelmed again, laying on my kitchen floor again. But here’s the thing—my health is… fine? Midterm week I didn’t sleep, and yes I passed out twice, but no ER. For the past 18 months, I can count on one hand the number of mornings I’ve been unable to get out of bed because of fatigue. My heart still pounds too hard but my head doesn’t swim every time I sit up. I walk the streets of New York City like mobility has never been a problem. I always take the stairs. My brain doesn’t itch until it’s been 30 hours no sleep.

I couldn’t go to class last week. I lay on the floor of my kitchen and stared up at the ceiling and tried to get up, tried to type out an email to my professors, and I couldn’t do it. I was not too tired. I was not too weak. I was not in pain. I could not move. I try to write and try to write and try to write and the words don’t come. I eat instant oatmeal at 9 PM because I haven’t been to the store in a month. I have lost nearly 15 pounds since moving to New York. I clean the stove for two and a half hours but can’t bring myself to take the dead spider off the side of the bathtub. I check the door lock one-two-three times, pace the floor, sit back down. I do not read Austerlitz. I write a Canvas post for Self and Other but it’s nonsense. I do not write a Canvas post for Accounts of Self. I do not write a Canvas post for Applied Writing. I write a Canvas post for Illness and Disability and somehow forget to post it, the one thing I’ve actually done, because I’m too busy feeling sick at everything I haven’t. I shadow a doctor for the clinical witnessing assignment and everything is fine but when I try to write it up I have a panic attack that leaves me sobbing on my couch and the assignment nine days late and counting. It takes me eight hours to write two pages. I watch 18 hours of YouTube video essays discussing drama about creators I don’t even watch and play a stupid game on my phone for an entire weekend until I’ve spent $25+ in a labyrinth of microtransations and every time I close my eyes I see the moving dots.

In November of 2015 I had three overdue essays for Global Literature, and two more due in the next two weeks. More than half were on books I had not read. My pre-lab wasn’t done for organic chemistry, and I wondered for a moment, if I pretended to pass out, if that would be easier. I stayed up until 4 AM laying on my floor and listening to Hamilton. I was sick, that much is true, but when I felt okay I still sat at my computer and could not bring myself to write.

In 2011 I had so many unfinished assignments for my college-level English class that I resigned myself to failing and I went to school the morning of the final class, but I hid in the stairwell by the choir room until I heard the bell, and I never went back to that class.

2009 was the year my dad stopped being able to yell at me for not doing my homework, because no one, including me, could tell whether it was actually my eyes stopping me.

In 2008 I wrote 6 essays in the 5 days of Thanksgiving break because I had not done any work for Intro to Lit all semester. I pulled it off, somehow, even aced the class because of an unusually lenient late work policy, but what I most remember is the sick feeling of dread as I lay on the floor in the living room staring up at the Christmas tree and feeling invisible sand slip through an invisible hourglass and a vice tightening in my chest.

In 2006 I stayed up almost all night writing a paper and crying my eyes out because I couldn’t find the words to explain to anyone why it had been so impossible for me to get the work done, that I wasn’t being lazy or distracted, I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t necessarily reading YA novels or watching TV or IMing my friends instead of working, I could sit and stare at a blank word document for 6 hours straight and still it would not get done. Everyone talked about potential, talked about how smart I was, but a gradebook that is half 100’s and half 0’s still averages out to an F. No one, including me, could explain the discrepancy. The logic of that simple math was not lost on me, the knowledge that turning in half-finished or not very good work was mathematically better than not doing it, but that didn’t mean I could do it. Words failed me when I tried to explain the illogic of my particular suffering.

I didn’t hear the term executive dysfunction until I was in my 20s. In retrospect I was tentatively told at 16 that I had “probably some ADHD and OCD”, but that psychiatrist was someone I’d been sent to by a neurologist because he thought she could fix my eyes, and when she said she couldn’t, I stopped making appointments. After I got sick, physically sick, the lines blurred between what was causing what, to the point where even I have no idea. Two of the Novembers missing here are ones I spent at CC, on the block plan where I only took one class at a time. My physical health arguably improved a little after transferring in January of 2016, but mostly it didn’t, not until Spring of 2018 at least. And you can see that evidence in dropped blocks, concussions from passing out onto hard surfaces, a couple of incompletes taken when viral illnesses (or concussions) compounded my other problems. What the block plan changed was the way things pile up, lessened the struggle of constant task switching between classes. (Admittedly, I also had fewer papers when taking mostly science classes. Writing takes much more energy, and it’s much harder to convince myself it doesn’t have to be perfect to be worth submitting.) At CC nothing ever really reached the level of catastrophe. Some of that is purely the ability to drop a single block, meaning when it was my physical health that was the problem, I didn’t lose a whole semester, just one class, then reset. But I should have realized sooner that the block plan wouldn’t account for the level of improvement if my physical health had really been the only barrier.

So we’re back to now. Grad school. November again. Dark again. Semester plan again. Too much writing again. Crushing dread again. Dysfunction again. Panic attack in the middle of the night increasingly elaborate organizing rituals scream of the subway tracks in my mind can’t stop can’t start can’t breathe can’t move burnout again. This time without the explanation of chronic fatigue to fall back on.

I have my tricks, have actually learned somewhat to cope in the past 18 years. Schedules help, break tasks into pieces that are as small as possible. Mindfulness meditation. Forgive yourself when it’s not perfect. Get started with something easy, set a timer for 20 minutes and only work for those 20 minutes and then let yourself stop if you want to (and surprisingly often, you won’t want to, sometimes that momentum is all it takes). If you work better in the night, work in the night, who cares what society says your sleep schedule should be. When switching tasks, physically get up and move to a different location. Allow yourself to procrastinate on work with other work if that’s what you have to do. Delete the stupid games from your phone. One or two missed assignments are not actually the end of the world, if you let yourself view it as piling up, you won’t be able to get anything done, so if you absolutely have to, just move through and move on.

It’s not a catastrophe, this November. It’s a fight, but it’s not a catastrophe. I read Austerlitz and forgive myself for skimming it. I write a Canvas post and forgive myself when it’s only 500 words and doesn’t make complete sense. I read Toni Morrison and Édouard Louis and classmates’ discussion posts about Deaf culture and identity and remember why this matters in the first place, that it’s not just a series of assignments to overwhelm me, it’s a series of interesting complicated exhausting important thoughts and questions. I get it done. Some of it. Most of it. I let myself sleep. I breathe. I remember to be grateful because I can get out of bed in the mornings and take the stairs. I am okay.

[haileybtcu-blog]

New Year, New Me?

This semester is off to a busy and rapid start...that being said, there’s no way I’d rather have it! While I was feeling quite overwhelmed toward the beginning of last week between the wifi troubles and a newly refreshed schedule, I did get a lot of stuff done which always helps to calm my nerves. After a relatively rough winter break, I have made it my new years resolution to prioritize self-care in the form of healthier eating habits and incorporating 30 minutes of exercise into my daily routine. While the first couple of weeks of this endeavor have been far from perfect, there is certainly a marked improvement over last semester and I’ve noticed that my energy and attitude have been trending positively. I also took advantage of the long weekend to eat out at a lot of my favorite Fort Worth restaurants and to steal my boy’s kitchen to cook some home cooked yums (although I did destroy some soup...which I’m not at all proud of.) My other resolution, in an attempt to enjoy and get the most of my well-liked semester schedule, is to completely remove my phone from class time, which so far, has been largely successful and contributed to my enjoyment of and participation within my classes. I also killed my AHD interview and I’m super pumped to see what that could mean in terms of my placement next year. Plus, a week can’t be that bad when you make a 100 on your first OChem quiz, right?

As for what could have gone better I don’t have much to say. I wish I had been more consistent in my study and workout schedule but I also understand that life happens and sometimes rest is what your body needs. I also have found myself to be more impatient than I thought I was going into this semester in a lot of aspects of my life but I know that this is just another opportunity for personal growth going forward. Overall, I’d have to give this week a 7. Not bad, but plenty of room for improvement as I get into a routine.

One of my biggest passions thus far, in both my life and the residence hall, has been being a champion of mental health. As someone who suffers from a condition myself, I know how important self-care can be to both my physical and mental wellbeing. Therefore, if I had to plan a program about something that I am passionate about, I would like to start here. At first, looking at this prompt and knowing the subject matter I wanted to address I felt a little bit overwhelmed and unsure of where to start. However, after processing through it with Kendra I was able to come up with a super cool idea...an active program featuring stress (one of the largest contributing factors to mental illness in college students). In this program, students would be encouraged to take a stress test to rate their level of stress along with information about the ties between stress and mental health as well as some healthy coping mechanisms and ways to reduce stress.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I’ll update you on my new year successes and failures next week!

Hails

[birdkoskincare]

As a suffering 2nd year biochem student, how did you do in organic chemistry 2? Im really struggling on remembering all the reagents and what they do. Any tips?

i relate to this ask so much :’) yr1 and yr2 were like… ochem hell. still for some reason my uni optionals seem to always include more and more ochem, so it’s kinda a love-hate relationship for me. but i somehow went from an 11/20 in ochem 1 to a 16/20 in ochem 2 aaand i also increased ochem 1 to a 16/20 on my second year by retaking my exam. but tbh it’s still a goliath of a subject so… how to get through it?

mindmaps!! studying alkenes? ethers? alcohols? write that down in the center of a blank piece of paper and proceed to write all the reactions you’re studying around it. then actually go over your mindmaps regularly, never looking at them after you make them won’t help much.

one thing that really helped me study the reactions and reagents was flashcards. at a point i literally took them everywhere; they were color-coded by chapter and had the title of the reaction (say, “aldol condensation”) in the front and the actual reagents, catalysts and products (and sometimes mechanism notes) in the back

something i regret is not having used more diversified resources. following your class slides and notes is good, but don’t ignore the textbook or the wonderful resources you can find at khan academy or youtube (and if you can follow it well enough set the video speed to 1.25 so you can cover more topics quicker)

do every single exercise, exam, practice worksheet, etc you can get your hands on. ochem reminds me a lot of maths in that it requires so much practice until your brain wraps itself around the logic of it! once it does it’ll feel like a fun puzzle.

work throughout the semester. for the love of god don’t let it all pile up for the week before the exam. you’ll cry a lot.

if you’re really stuck, don’t hesitate and go to office hours. just go. it works wonders, i promise. make a lil post it note with all your questions and your teacher will be much happier to answer them than to hand out a failing grade and see you again next year.

resources from other studyblrs:

ochem masterpost

studying ochem

now go and get those grades, you got this!