Why Do You Have to Take Chemistry for Your Major?

Nurses, biologists, doctors and engineers all start in the same place on the course list. You opened your degree plan and found one or two semesters of chemistry sitting right in the middle of it. Maybe you groaned. Maybe you wondered if someone made a mistake. Why do...

How to Get an A in Chemistry: Habits of Top Gen Chem Students

You’re passing gen chem. You do the homework, you show up, and your grades hover in the B range. But you want the A, maybe for a GPA that pre-med or nursing programs will look at, maybe just because you know you can do better. The gap between a B and an A is...

How to Pass Organic Chemistry: A Plan for Orgo 1

You’ve heard the orgo stories from older friends and seen them on pre-med forums. Maybe you felt it yourself in the first week, when the professor drew a molecule as a zigzag line with no carbons labeled. Still, there’s a clear answer to how to pass...

Significant Figures Rules: A Plain-English Guide

You did the chemistry perfectly. Right setup, right units, right calculator steps. Then your answer came back marked wrong because you wrote 6.384 instead of 6.4. Sound familiar? Significant figures trip up a lot of students, mostly because the rules get taught as a...

How to Use Dimensional Analysis in Chemistry

Chemistry word problems have a sneaky way of looking impossible. You get milliliters, a density, a molar mass and a question asking for molecules, and it’s hard to know where to start. One method handles almost all of them. It’s called dimensional...