CHEM 30C
Organic Chemistry III: Reactivity, Synthesis, and Biomolecules
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Enforced requisite: course 30B with grade of C- or better. Third term of organic chemistry for Chemistry, Biochemistry, and engineering majors. Chemistry of enolates, enamines, dicarbonyl compounds, and amines. Molecular orbital theory and conjugated pi systems; UV/vis spectroscopy. Aromaticity and reactions of aromatic molecules. Heterocycles, pericyclic reactions, carbohydrates, and lipids. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - Tl;dr: Take this class if you want an interesting professor and if you're good at studying, not if you need more support. Maynard is just ok. I don't think she deserves the bad rap from the other reviews, but you will be studying a lot with her. Going to discussion section is really important because the TAs will explain mechanisms in more detail than she does. Also, we covered polymers instead of UV/Vis spectroscopy and biomolecules (both of which Dr. Ow covers), which is kind of a let down. Maynard does care about her students, but they aren't her first priority. She does lots of fancy and important research in drug development, which made her office hours and her final lecture very interesting, but research is more important to her than teaching. She paid the textbook company, Cengage, for her slides, instead of making her own, which didn't affect the quality of her lectures, but it did make it clear that she didn't care to dedicate the time to make her own, more detailed slides, or even ask another Chem 30C prof to use theirs. Dr Ow's Chem 30C slides are much more comprehensive than hers, and his lectures are better at explaining things. Maynard's lectures consisted of her explaining the mechanism in the first half and then doing practice problems during the second half, which was ok, but if you didn't understand the mechanism when she first explained it. She and the TAs will go around and help you with the practice problems, which is nice if you want a lot of face time with a very influential prof to get a letter of rec from her. The grading scheme was 30% Midterm 1, 30% Midterm 2, and 30% Midterm 3 with no final exam. It's pretty unforgiving and Maynard is a stickler for the UCLA policy of not making accomodations without a doctor's note. On the bright side, since the TAs only have one test to grade at a time, they return grades really quickly, within 2 days. Also, the light amount of grading makes the TAs a lot happier to be there than for classes with more things to grade, so they are generally happy to help you out in discussion section and office hours. Shout out to Katie Zhu for being one of the coolest TAs I've had at UCLA. Also, Maynard is so busy with her research and her lab is so well-funded that she has a personal assistant, so if you want to meet with her privately, you'll have to go through her personal assistant to make an appointment. I will say that Maynard is nice and she does care. She is not the frigid and aloof research professor that you may fear; she is very approachable. Teaching is just not a priority for her.
Winter 2025 - Tl;dr: Take this class if you want an interesting professor and if you're good at studying, not if you need more support. Maynard is just ok. I don't think she deserves the bad rap from the other reviews, but you will be studying a lot with her. Going to discussion section is really important because the TAs will explain mechanisms in more detail than she does. Also, we covered polymers instead of UV/Vis spectroscopy and biomolecules (both of which Dr. Ow covers), which is kind of a let down. Maynard does care about her students, but they aren't her first priority. She does lots of fancy and important research in drug development, which made her office hours and her final lecture very interesting, but research is more important to her than teaching. She paid the textbook company, Cengage, for her slides, instead of making her own, which didn't affect the quality of her lectures, but it did make it clear that she didn't care to dedicate the time to make her own, more detailed slides, or even ask another Chem 30C prof to use theirs. Dr Ow's Chem 30C slides are much more comprehensive than hers, and his lectures are better at explaining things. Maynard's lectures consisted of her explaining the mechanism in the first half and then doing practice problems during the second half, which was ok, but if you didn't understand the mechanism when she first explained it. She and the TAs will go around and help you with the practice problems, which is nice if you want a lot of face time with a very influential prof to get a letter of rec from her. The grading scheme was 30% Midterm 1, 30% Midterm 2, and 30% Midterm 3 with no final exam. It's pretty unforgiving and Maynard is a stickler for the UCLA policy of not making accomodations without a doctor's note. On the bright side, since the TAs only have one test to grade at a time, they return grades really quickly, within 2 days. Also, the light amount of grading makes the TAs a lot happier to be there than for classes with more things to grade, so they are generally happy to help you out in discussion section and office hours. Shout out to Katie Zhu for being one of the coolest TAs I've had at UCLA. Also, Maynard is so busy with her research and her lab is so well-funded that she has a personal assistant, so if you want to meet with her privately, you'll have to go through her personal assistant to make an appointment. I will say that Maynard is nice and she does care. She is not the frigid and aloof research professor that you may fear; she is very approachable. Teaching is just not a priority for her.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2023 - Wow this class was something else. merlic was a fantastic lecturer and the content was so interesting but the grades were so all over the place? There were weekly quizzes (STARTING WEEK 1?!) and he did not explicitly have a grading scale so he would just curve individually. The class average was always an F or a D- which was kinda funny, but even though I scored higher or equal to the class average on every exam I ended up getting a B-?.... also I know someone who got below the average on every exam but ended up with an A- so I'm really confused. I guess he grades on how drastically your score increases not on how high your score actually is compared to the average.
Spring 2023 - Wow this class was something else. merlic was a fantastic lecturer and the content was so interesting but the grades were so all over the place? There were weekly quizzes (STARTING WEEK 1?!) and he did not explicitly have a grading scale so he would just curve individually. The class average was always an F or a D- which was kinda funny, but even though I scored higher or equal to the class average on every exam I ended up getting a B-?.... also I know someone who got below the average on every exam but ended up with an A- so I'm really confused. I guess he grades on how drastically your score increases not on how high your score actually is compared to the average.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2025 - Glorious King Franklin Ow. While this is the last of the 30 series, I'd say that in terms of difficulty it is actually slightly easier than 30B. There is a lot of material to get through, but in terms of variety it's less than 30B because you have a lot more patterns to utilize. With regards to the professor, he's one of the best at UCLA and a personal favorite of mine. His expectations are always very clear in terms of what you need to know and as a lecturer he's fantastic at conveying the material in an effective way. I walked out of almost every lecture feeling confident I understood everything he explained. Dr. Ow is very emphatic on patterns you can recognize as a sort of shortcut for learning the reaction mechanisms and products, which makes it easy to pick up on things quick. He's succinct with the only fluff being him trying to engage deeper with the material by explaining pharmaceutical or industrial applications of certain organic compounds and reactions. He's also quite funny and sometimes uses anecdotes to describe parts of the class. I found the lectures to be engaging and effective, so I went even though they're recorded and livestreamed on Zoom. Given the course, you definitely need to still be practicing with the textbook problems provided. I don't have the exact gradescheme because I no longer have access to the Canvas course, but it is similar if not identical to the other Ow markschemes. Discussion attendance was probably around 10%, the two midterms made up 40%, the final was about 30%, and the remaining 20% was split between the best of 5/7 quiz grades. I thought everything was very fair, and the average was in the high 70s to 80s for the midterms. He also always reserves lectures for review before exams, which is pretty helpful because it shows problem solving strategies and gives you a hint as to what to expect on the exam. All of the exams and quizzes are very doable if you're keeping up with the material, and the final and quizzes were all multiple choice. A small amount of extra credit is also offered for filling out LA surveys and course evaluations, in addition to turning in your submission of the practice exams. Because this is organic chemistry, you can't leave it on the backburner, but if you're keeping it in view, it's very very feasible to do well.
Spring 2025 - Glorious King Franklin Ow. While this is the last of the 30 series, I'd say that in terms of difficulty it is actually slightly easier than 30B. There is a lot of material to get through, but in terms of variety it's less than 30B because you have a lot more patterns to utilize. With regards to the professor, he's one of the best at UCLA and a personal favorite of mine. His expectations are always very clear in terms of what you need to know and as a lecturer he's fantastic at conveying the material in an effective way. I walked out of almost every lecture feeling confident I understood everything he explained. Dr. Ow is very emphatic on patterns you can recognize as a sort of shortcut for learning the reaction mechanisms and products, which makes it easy to pick up on things quick. He's succinct with the only fluff being him trying to engage deeper with the material by explaining pharmaceutical or industrial applications of certain organic compounds and reactions. He's also quite funny and sometimes uses anecdotes to describe parts of the class. I found the lectures to be engaging and effective, so I went even though they're recorded and livestreamed on Zoom. Given the course, you definitely need to still be practicing with the textbook problems provided. I don't have the exact gradescheme because I no longer have access to the Canvas course, but it is similar if not identical to the other Ow markschemes. Discussion attendance was probably around 10%, the two midterms made up 40%, the final was about 30%, and the remaining 20% was split between the best of 5/7 quiz grades. I thought everything was very fair, and the average was in the high 70s to 80s for the midterms. He also always reserves lectures for review before exams, which is pretty helpful because it shows problem solving strategies and gives you a hint as to what to expect on the exam. All of the exams and quizzes are very doable if you're keeping up with the material, and the final and quizzes were all multiple choice. A small amount of extra credit is also offered for filling out LA surveys and course evaluations, in addition to turning in your submission of the practice exams. Because this is organic chemistry, you can't leave it on the backburner, but if you're keeping it in view, it's very very feasible to do well.
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