Louis La Minh Hoang

Today’s chemistry lesson was all about revisiting organic chemistry, and honestly, it felt like tightening every bolt in the entire topic. Even though I’ve studied organic chemistry before, going back through the details helped everything click into place much more clearly.

We started by reviewing the basics: hydrocarbons, homologous series, and the structure of alkanes, alkenes, and alkynes. But instead of just memorising formulas, the focus was on understanding how each series behaves and why their reactions differ. This made even the simple ideas feel deeper, especially when comparing the stability and bonding of saturated versus unsaturated compounds.

Once the basics were solid, we moved into reaction pathways—how one organic molecule can be transformed into another. The lesson emphasized not just knowing the products, but truly understanding the conditions, catalysts, and mechanisms behind each conversion. Combustion, cracking, addition reactions of alkenes, polymerisation, and even the tricky oxidation steps all came back into focus.

We also revised functional groups, from alcohols to carboxylic acids, and how their presence changes a molecule’s properties and reactivity. Recognising these groups quickly became essential for predicting reactions in exam-style questions. Instead of guessing, I had to think logically about how electrons move and what the functional group “wants to do.”

The hardest part was solving multi-step problems where the question gives several reaction clues and asks you to identify the compounds or draw the reaction pathway. These require everything—knowledge of structures, naming conventions, reaction conditions, and careful reasoning. But working through them again helped build confidence and reminded me how important it is to think systematically.

By the end of the revision, organic chemistry felt far more connected than before. Instead of scattered facts, it became a linked network of reactions, structures, and rules that actually made sense together. It was a lot of content, but reviewing it thoroughly made everything sharper, cleaner, and much easier to apply.