I'm SO excited by today's post! I've brought onboard McKenna, who runs the gorgeous and hugely popular instagram account @magnolia_med, documenting her pre-med study journey. McKenna shares her secrets for how to study organic chemistry - how she turned a 65 into an A in Organic Chemistry, and her top tips for the ACS final exam!

Amides are one of the most important functional groups in Organic Chemistry. They're ubiquitous in biology and medicine and understanding their structure and properties is vital to understanding what gives proteins their shapes. Here with a special guest Spotlight on Amides is MedChemProf, an Associate Professor in a School of Pharmacy, with strong interest in modern technology in teaching. Read on and be sure to have a play with the cool interactive molecules scattered throughout the post!  - Mark

Once you've mastered the art of drawing chair conformations, it's time to stick some axial and equatorial substituents on those beautiful chairs. In marking thousands of exam papers, there's 2 mistakes that I've seen over and over again. Here's how to avoid those mistakes ace any chair conformations in your OChem exams.

Let's face it, chair cyclohexanes are not a shape that comes naturally for anyone to draw. That's why you need a system to get them right. Here is how to draw chair conformations in 39 seconds...

Chiral centers come in two flavours - vanilla or chocolate chip... Just kidding! They come in R and S varieties. There's a three-step process for assigning the R or S, and one of the steps in putting the lowest priority group at the back, away from you. But what do you do when the lowest priority group isn't behaving and isn't already at the back? Read on and watch the video to find out two simple strategies that will rock your chiral world!

If there's one thing you're guaranteed in Organic Chemistry exams, it's to be asked mechanism questions! Reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry are the bread and butter of exam questions! So how do you avoid the most common mistakes?

You probably don't want me designing your house. I can't look at floorplans and 'see' what the finished building will be like. Similarly, when it came to understanding molecules in 3D, I wasn't a natural. I particularly remember being bad at Newman projections! And yet, as a research organic chemist, my specialty was stereochemistry. How does that work?!

I loved playing with Lego when I was a young boy and I don't think it is an over-statement to say that the love of building more complicated constructions from simple Lego building blocks led, at least in part, to me becoming an organic chemist!

I distinctly remember the turning point in my organic chemistry studies. It was mid-way through my first full Organic Chemistry course. I felt like I was drowning in reactions and mechanisms. There seemed endless! So, I wrote them all out on a large sheet of paper, and stuck it to the back of the toilet door (TMI?). Eventually, after repeatedly seeing all those reactions written out, the patterns emerged and it started to make sense. The good news is that you don't need to re-decorate your water closet to get the same results! Flash cards to the rescue!

Want to eat organic nomenclature problems up for breakfast? Let's put the system for naming alkanes to work and practice organic chemistry nomenclature with one big, convoluted molecule - I'm calling it "alkane spaghetti"!