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I liked o-chem, and I took 3 semesters of it, even though I was only minoring in chemistry. Its reputation as super-hard might have been motivation for me. Synt
by mtdewcmu 13y ago
I liked o-chem, and I took 3 semesters of it, even though I was only minoring in chemistry. Its reputation as super-hard might have been motivation for me. Synthesis is a little like programming.
- dnautics 13y agoIt really is! The mental part of planning a synthesis is a lot like programming. The differences are: parts (i.e. reactions) are less interchangeable, and when you actually make the stuff, you get diminishing returns, "recompile" is not as trivial a task. Synthetic biology is a lot closer, since you can copy DNA at will, and while editing is not as simple as spinning up an instance of vi, "recompile" is a whole heck of a lot easier.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoI didn't take the organic chem lab course, because I had a bad time in lab I. The o-chem lab might have been better, since it was supposed to be more qualitative and less quantitative, so maybe it would have been less susceptible to shaky titration hands... but I didn't want to chance it. The analogy to programming only goes so far, but the differences were enjoyable to me, since I had plenty of exposure to real programming.