Master Organic Chemistry — From First Principles

I know exactly where you are right now.

You're staring at a mechanism, and you have no idea why the electrons are moving the way they are. Or you've memorized the SN2 reaction, but the moment the question changes the substrate or the solvent, you freeze. Or you're doing fine — technically — but you have this nagging feeling that you're pattern-matching your way through a subject you don't actually understand. And with the MCAT, biochemistry, or a research lab somewhere on your horizon, that feeling matters.

I built this course because that gap — between surface familiarity and real understanding — is exactly what destroys students in organic chemistry. Not a lack of intelligence. Not insufficient hours spent studying. A lack of a coherent, principled framework for thinking about molecules. When you understand why a tertiary carbocation is more stable than a primary one, you don't need to memorize which reactions proceed through carbocation intermediates — you can reason to the answer. When you understand what a curved arrow actually represents, arrow-pushing stops being an art form and becomes a logic exercise. That is the kind of understanding this course is designed to produce.

We move systematically from the ground up: atomic orbitals and hybridization, resonance and pKa, functional groups and the logic that connects them. Then stereochemistry — not as a disconnected detour, but as the essential three-dimensional context for everything that follows. Then mechanisms, two full units of them, covering substitution, elimination, addition, aromaticity, and the full landscape of carbonyl chemistry: nucleophilic addition, acyl substitution, enolate reactions, aldol and Claisen condensations, and the Michael reaction. We finish with spectroscopy and retrosynthesis — the skills that separate students who know organic chemistry from students who can use it.

I want to be honest with you about what this course is: it is rigorous. I will ask you to think carefully, to work through problems you find hard, and to resist the urge to look up the answer before you've genuinely tried. I'll use analogies to make abstract concepts concrete, and I'll ask Socratic questions to sharpen your reasoning — but I will not hand you shortcuts that collapse the moment an exam question is phrased differently than you expected. What I will give you is a durable, transferable, professor-level understanding of organic chemistry.

If you're willing to work at that level, I am genuinely glad you're here. Let's get to work.