I became the campus tutor for organic chemistry, and later for biochemistry too. Most of my students had never been shown how to study for a class like this. Nobody had a plan, and almost nobody was drawing. So I passed along what my professor told me: draw the structures, by hand, until you don’t need to look. And I told them the same thing every semester after that: the pain of failing this class is about the same as the pain of getting an A. It’s going to hurt either way. You might as well get the A.
That’s where the first sheets came from. When students got lost in substitution and elimination, I drew out the decision the way I’d learned to make it: which conditions point to SN1, which to SN2, which to E1 or E2. That chart was the first thing I made for someone else, and it became the first organic chemistry guide in this library. Chair conformations got a template. Alkanes, alkenes and alkynes got one. Every time I watched students get stuck in the same place, I built something to get them past it, then tried it on the next group.
When I took biochemistry, the first exam was amino acids. Every textbook, study guide and website I could find drew the twenty of them differently: different orientations, different groupings, no two sources agreeing. So I stopped looking and rearranged them myself, into five blocks where every neighbor shares a feature. It was a small revelation, the kind that makes you wonder why it wasn’t always done that way. It also showed me the drawing-sheet idea wasn’t just an organic chemistry trick. It works on anything you have to be able to draw cold.
Biochemistry also showed me what a curve hides. Students who’d made it through organic chemistry with a curved B-minus felt like they understood it, right up until biochemistry proved they didn’t. Biochemistry assumes everything underneath it, which is why this library covers both.
I won’t forget watching the amino acid grid land. Students who’d been beaten up by organic chemistry, bracing for another semester of the same, would look at those five blocks and their faces would change. They could see the path, and how quickly they could walk it.
The sessions kept growing. What started as one student at a table became two-and-a-half-hour group sessions, eight to twenty students at a time, two or three times a week. Often I’d start by giving my own version of that week’s lecture, the student’s-eye version that slows down exactly where people trip, and then we’d work. Eventually the faculty created a tutoring award that hadn’t existed before. I was its first recipient, and it still surprises me.
