Make sense of IUPAC names, common names, prefixes, suffixes, and numbering. You will be able to recognize and name simple alkanes, alcohols, halides, alkenes, alkynes, aromatics, amines, and carbonyl compounds.

See molecules as three-dimensional objects with bond angles, rotation, strain, and conformations. This prepares you to predict shape, stability, and reactivity instead of treating drawings as flat symbols.

Trace how organic chemistry grew from natural products and dyes into petroleum chemistry, pharmaceuticals, polymers, and modern synthesis. The focus is on the discoveries, instruments, and industries that shaped how chemists work today.

Handle organic chemicals with practical care: PPE, fume hoods, labels, SDS sheets, flammability, toxicity, spills, waste containers, and incompatible reagents. You will connect safety rules to the actual hazards of solvents and reactions.

Use electronegativity, formal charge, oxidation state, dipoles, inductive effects, and polar bonds to predict where reactions start. This chapter gives you the language of electron-rich and electron-poor sites.

Draw resonance structures, judge which forms matter most, and see how delocalized electrons change stability and reactivity. You will use resonance to explain ions, carbonyls, conjugated systems, and aromatic rings later on.

Connect acidity, basicity, nucleophilicity, electrophilicity, solvent effects, and pKa values. You will predict which proton moves, which atom attacks, and which reactions are reasonable.

Use energy diagrams, activation energy, intermediates, transition states, thermodynamics, kinetics, and equilibrium. This helps you explain not just whether a reaction can happen, but how fast and by what path.

Draw curved arrows that track electron movement step by step. You will turn reactions from memorized equations into mechanisms you can reason through.

Practice the core tasks of an organic lab: measuring, dissolving, heating, cooling, refluxing, stirring, filtering, extracting, drying, and evaporating solvents. The goal is to connect reaction equations to the hands-on work that makes products.

Use recrystallization, distillation, extraction, TLC, column chromatography, GC, and HPLC to separate mixtures and judge purity. You will choose a method based on boiling point, polarity, solubility, and scale.

Use IR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to identify functional groups, molecular weight, fragments, and clues about structure. These tools give quick evidence before deeper structural analysis.

Use proton NMR, carbon NMR, splitting, integration, chemical shifts, coupling constants, and basic 2D NMR ideas. You will assemble spectral clues into full organic structures.

Combine formula, IR, MS, NMR, and chemical reasoning to identify unknown compounds. This chapter builds the practical skill of defending a structure from evidence.

Study alkanes, cycloalkanes, chair conformations, ring strain, combustion, and halogenation. You will see how even “unreactive” hydrocarbons reveal important ideas about shape and stability.

Tell enantiomers, diastereomers, meso compounds, R/S labels, E/Z alkenes, chirality, optical activity, and stereochemical purity apart. This prepares you for reactions where the exact 3D arrangement changes the outcome.

Predict SN1, SN2, E1, and E2 reactions of alkyl halides and sulfonates. You will choose conditions, products, stereochemical outcomes, and competing pathways.

Use additions to alkenes and alkynes, including hydrohalogenation, hydration, halogenation, hydroboration-oxidation, ozonolysis, and reductions. You will predict regioselectivity and stereochemistry for common π-bond reactions.

Work with radicals, bond dissociation energies, chain reactions, allylic bromination, radical additions, polymerization, and radical clocks. This chapter shows why single-electron chemistry behaves differently from polar mechanisms.

Handle reactions of alcohols, thiols, ethers, epoxides, and related leaving-group conversions. You will use oxidation, reduction, substitution, protection, and ring opening to transform common functional groups.

Use organolithium, Grignard, organocuprate, and related reagents to form carbon-carbon bonds. You will connect reagent choice to reactivity, selectivity, moisture sensitivity, and carbonyl additions.

Study conjugated dienes, allylic systems, UV-visible absorption, Diels-Alder reactions, electrocyclic reactions, and sigmatropic shifts. You will see how orbital alignment controls reactions across several atoms at once.

Use aromaticity, antiaromaticity, Hückel’s rule, and ring currents to explain unusual stability. This chapter prepares you for the chemistry of benzene, heterocycles, dyes, drugs, and materials.

Predict electrophilic aromatic substitution, substituent effects, directing groups, nucleophilic aromatic substitution, and benzyne pathways. You will plan reactions on benzene rings with control over position and conditions.

Study aldehydes and ketones through nucleophilic addition, imines, acetals, cyanohydrins, Wittig reactions, oxidations, and reductions. You will use the carbonyl group as one of the central handles in synthesis.

Work with carboxylic acids, acid chlorides, anhydrides, esters, amides, nitriles, and their interconversions. You will predict acyl substitution reactions and choose derivatives for synthesis.

Use enols, enolates, aldol reactions, Claisen condensations, Michael additions, Robinson annulations, and alkylations. This chapter builds carbon-carbon bonds next to carbonyls with attention to selectivity.

Study amines, ammonium salts, basicity, alkylation, acylation, diazonium chemistry, reductive amination, and common nitrogen protecting groups. You will see why nitrogen chemistry is central to medicines and biomolecules.

Work with pyridine, pyrrole, furan, thiophene, indole, imidazole, and other heterocycles. You will predict how heteroatoms change aromaticity, basicity, and reaction position.

Cover useful reactions of sulfur, phosphorus, silicon, boron, and halogen-containing organic compounds. You will see how these atoms change reactivity and enable methods that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen cannot do alone.

Use protecting groups, chemoselectivity, regioselectivity, stereoselectivity, and functional group compatibility. You will decide what must react, what must stay untouched, and how to avoid side reactions.

Plan syntheses backward from a target molecule using disconnections, synthons, retrons, and known reaction patterns. You will turn a product into a practical sequence of starting materials and steps.

Connect catalysis to lower activation energy, turnover, selectivity, ligands, transition metals, organocatalysts, and enzyme-like behavior. You will judge why a small amount of catalyst can change both speed and product choice.

Use chiral pool starting materials, chiral auxiliaries, chiral catalysts, kinetic resolution, and asymmetric hydrogenation. You will plan reactions where one mirror-image product is strongly preferred.

Follow a realistic project from target choice to literature search, route planning, risk review, reaction setup, workup, purification, characterization, yield calculation, and lab report. This chapter ties the course’s ideas into the workflow chemists actually use.

Study monosaccharides, glycosidic bonds, protecting-group challenges, polysaccharides, and carbohydrate recognition. You will connect stereochemistry and functional groups to sugars in food, cells, and medicine.

Cover amino acids, peptide bonds, protecting groups, solid-phase peptide synthesis, protein structure, and peptide analysis. You will see how organic reactions build and modify biological molecules.

Study fatty acids, triglycerides, phospholipids, steroids, terpenes, nucleosides, nucleotides, and key metabolic transformations. This chapter connects organic structure to membranes, hormones, DNA, RNA, and metabolism.

Use chain-growth and step-growth polymerization, copolymers, crosslinking, thermoplastics, thermosets, elastomers, and degradation. You will connect molecular structure to plastics, fibers, coatings, and everyday materials.

Apply organic chemistry to drug properties: binding groups, pKa, logP, solubility, metabolism, toxicity, prodrugs, structure-activity relationships, and lead optimization. You will see how synthesis and structure guide medicine design.

Use atom economy, solvent choice, safer reagents, waste reduction, renewable feedstocks, life-cycle thinking, and process mass intensity. You will judge reactions not only by yield, but also by safety, cost, and environmental impact.

Study enzyme-catalyzed reactions, directed evolution, whole-cell biotransformations, cofactor recycling, and chemoenzymatic synthesis. Modern biocatalysis gives organic chemists selective reactions under mild conditions.

Use cross-coupling, directed C-H activation, late-stage functionalization, and metal-catalyzed methods that modify molecules without preinstalled handles. This chapter shows how chemists now edit complex structures more directly.

Use light, electricity, photocatalysts, redox potentials, and radical ions to drive reactions that heat alone cannot. You will compare photoredox and electrochemical methods as practical tools for modern synthesis.

Run reactions through tubing, mixers, pumps, heat exchangers, and inline monitoring instead of only in flasks. Flow chemistry improves heat control, safety, scaling, and reactions with unstable intermediates.

Use parallel reactions, microscale screening, robotics, plate formats, automated purification, and data-rich optimization. You will see how modern labs test many conditions quickly and choose better routes with evidence.

Use molecular modeling, conformational searches, reaction prediction, retrosynthesis software, machine learning, and AI-assisted literature search with healthy skepticism. The focus is on what these tools can support, where they fail, and how chemists verify their suggestions.

Study click reactions, strain-promoted cycloadditions, tetrazine ligations, labeling probes, and reactions that work inside living systems. These methods connect organic chemistry to imaging, diagnostics, and chemical biology.

Build habits for reading papers, checking procedures, using databases, keeping notebooks, reporting spectra, handling failed reactions, and communicating uncertainty. You will practice the judgment needed to keep improving beyond set problems.

Map the paths organic chemistry can lead to: synthesis, analytical work, medicinal chemistry, process chemistry, materials, teaching, quality control, regulatory work, and research. The chapter covers proof-of-skill artifacts, lab experience, safety credentials, graduate study, and ways chemists stay current.