ADVICES FOR STUDYING ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

1. Keep up with your studying day to day –– never let yourself get behind, or better yet, be a little ahead of your instructor. Organic chemistry is a course in which one idea almost always builds on another that has gone before.
2. Study materials in small units, and be sure that you understand each new section before you go on to the next. Because of the cumulative nature of organic chemistry, your studying will be much more effective if you take each new idea as it comes and try to understand it completely before you move onto the nest concept.
3. Work all of the in-chapter and assigned problems.
4. Write when you study. Write the reactions, mechanisms, structures, and so on, over and over again. You need to know the material so thoroughly that you can explain it to someone else. This level of understanding comes to most of us (those of us without photographic memories) through writing. Only by writing the reaction mechanisms do we pay sufficient attention to their details: a)  which atoms are connected to which atoms, b)which bonds break in a reaction and which bonds form. c) the three-dimensional aspects of the structure.
5. Learning by teaching and explaining. Study with your student peers and practice explaining concepts and mechanisms to each other.
6. Use the answers to the problems in the Study Guide in the proper way : a) Use the Study Guide to check your answer after you have finished a problem, b) Use the Study Guide for a clue when you are completely stuck. The value of a problem is in solving it!
7. Use the introductory material in the Study Guide entitled “Solving the puzzle ––or –– Structure is everything (Almost)” as a bridge from general chemistry to your beginning study of organic chemistry. Once you have a firm understanding of structure, the puzzle of organic chemistry can become one of very manageable size and comprehensible pieces.
8. Use molecular models when you study.

(Sumber: Solomons, 2001. Fundamental of Organic Chemistry)