This was a great class and I feel like I really learned a lot even though we only took it in six weeks. the information was very organized and professor Reilly gives her students a lot of resources to help them succeed. I feel like I learned everything I needed to know and even though ochem is not one of my best subjects Professor Reilly made it possible to succeed in her class. My recommendation to anyone taking the class is to at least do all the worksheets and write the reaction sheets yourself, and be really meticulous on exams. It was also really fun and she likes jokes and stuff which made the lectures enjoyable to go to and we got to make our own problems and memes which made me really happy. 100% recommend Reilly.

Dr. Reilly was incredibly kind and offered a bunch of extra credit as well as a completion for all our problem sets rather than being graded for correctness. She made everything open book and compiled all the reactions but somehow still managed to make the tests hard which is honestly probably good for learning because you still had to spend time studying rather than just using everything she gave you. I did most of the practice problems in the book and flashcards and that helped me a ton! However, I'm not sure if this applies to her other classes, but since it was summer, the information was PACKED. Like, I used to watch my math lectures at 2x speed but here I barely managed 1.5 and had to stop a lot because the information was so incredibly dense and with little breaks, making the 2 hour lectures straight a bit rough. Overall, awesome class and good prof, but definitely still hard, good luck!

Don’t believe what you read in her Bruin walk reviews. I recently had Reilly for chem 30b and it was probably the worst class I ever took at UCLA. Her lectures are messing and she talks so fast that standing up for a sec will miss a whole chapter. Surprisingly, she is also a very difficult grader and will nick pick on every little mistake. Her test are amazingly hard and she doesn’t prepare you are her test. (Not to mention we had 24 hours and it was still that hard.) Final is also out of this world. Still waiting for final grade but will end up with a A- or B+ depending on how I did on the final. To be honest, I felt like she didn’t care about her students especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, she tries her best to make the classes more difficult than normally. I would recommend taking Professor Hung V Pham for chem. He is awesome and straightforward!

Overall, I enjoyed my time in this class. It was definitely one of the most challenging courses I have taken. The first midterm was a real eye-opener and scored really low, I made it my mission to score higher and recommend the David R. Klein Organic Chemistry textbooks as they provide great and easy-to-understand explanations. The second midterm, unfortunately, did not go as well as I thought it would, she is a tough grader. Despite all of that, she offers a TON of extra credit opportunities and is very lenient to students going through tough times. She is also very enthusiastic during lectures and really cares about students, especially in one-on-one office hours. I recommend her.

Professor Reilly is no doubt a very smart and successful researcher, but some people are just not meant to be teachers. Her lectures were confusing and and hard to follow. She would frequently skip around and make mistakes. In addition, she has a very soft and quiet voice which was hard to hear at times. Her exams were challenging and I really struggled with them. Her Phd was in synthesis and it is her favorite topic so there was a lot of synthesis on the tests. In fact, our final exam was almost all synthesis based problems. I do feel for her though, she lost one of her beloved dogs during our quarter and from my understanding her dogs are the love of her life. I hope she is doing better and perhaps people have a better experience with her class now that she has recovered from the loss.

Dr. Reilly is honestly a great professor for CHEM 30B and one of my favorite professors at UCLA! 30B is definitely a monster compared to 30A, yet she was able to make the class as simple as possible for us and provided us the most resources to succeed. Here's how her class was broken down: 25% Midterm 1, 25% Midterm 2, 37.5% Final, 12.5% BACON
Lectures: My favorite part of Reilly's class was her lectures. Instead of having slides and bombarding us with reactions (there have to be around 100 for this class), she has pre-written lecture notes where she's drawn in her example molecules already, and you follow along with her as she also fills out the notes with arrow pushing, examples, etc.! Reilly's pre-written note style was concise, clear and so good I continued to use her style when writing notes for 30C. Many say she talks way too fast, which I personally disagree with, and she is always open to answering students' questions.
Resources: Reilly's godsend is posting a sheet of the reactions for each chapter that we learned and would even star which ones you'd need to know the arrow-pushing for. Even better is that she would often lessen how many reactions we needed to know the arrows for! She hosted office hours after every lecture and would be so kind to answer every question we had. Before exams and especially when learning NMR, she posted additional worksheets and practice exams for us to do with video solutions.
Exams: Reilly's exams were honestly pretty difficult, which is honestly just a product of how much content there is in the class. Her retrosynthesis questions were particularly difficult, and I had a hard time finishing them in only 50 minutes. One anomaly is that this was the quarter with the TA strikes, so our second midterm and final were moved online, with the final being all MC, so take this with a grain of salt.
Cons: While other students from previous quarters praised Reilly's fast communication, we experienced the exact opposite. She hardly responded to her emails and Campuswire DM, during the quarter went MIA for almost a week with no explanation, and though final grading was affected by the strikes, we didn't receive our final grades until week 1 of Winter.
Overall, I highly recommend taking Reilly for 30B! She is such a kind professor, lenient, and her exams are difficult but fair.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU WANT TO ACTUALLY LEARN OCHEM. Honestly I am SO disappointed with Dr. Reilly. She truly does not care about teaching or her students. First of all her grading breakdown was insane and I nearly dropped the class during the first week because of it. 10% BACON, 30% Exam 1, 30% Exam 2, 30% Exam 3. It was very clear the breakdown was like this because she is lazy and did not want to grade any more assignments than she wanted to. She also went on random ochem tangents in class which might have been fine in a normal quarter but a 6 week summer class??? no. One time she spent 40mins showing us pictures of her dog. The most frustrating part of this quarter was the last week. We were slightly behind on material and only had 3 lectures until our scheduled final. Monday she cancelled lecture due to "technical difficulties" and said she'd post a lecture later that day. Monday went, no lecture. She was also not responding on piazza or her email. She did not upload a worksheet for our Tuesday discussion and our poor TA had no idea what was going on either. Wednesday comes, still no makeup lecture. Dr. Reilly shows up and starts teaching like normal and announced she is canceling the lecture so "we don't have to rush material" although it is very clear now she just did not want to make a final. Thursday comes, once again no worksheet and still MIA on all platforms. Friday comes and she emails everyone saying lecture will start late since she is stuck at the DMV. SHE NEVER SHOWS AND DOESNT RESPOND ON PIAZZA, EMAIL, NOTHING. Mind you we still had 2 of the hardest chapters left to do. In the end she ends up posting lectures for those 2 chapters FROM LAST SUMMER. Doesn't even bother to record one. She is so unhelpful and lazy and does not care about your learning. I am praying for the kids who have to take chem 30c because this class definitely did not prepare us for that.

Professor Reilly is probably the nicest and most caring professor at UCLA. She genuinely cares about her students and she is always willing to help. Her class is very tough and challenging, and you must be prepared to grind. I took her for 30A and 30B during COVID. For 30B, I did all the suggested textbook problems, read the textbook, and did all the material she provided, and I was able to ace midterm 1 and the final (something I normally don't do). If you really apply yourself, the class is manageable. I hope I can take 30C with her, and I recommend taking chem with her.

Took class during the summer of 2020 and was my only class which was a plus. The key to success in doing well in chem30B is to study and be prepared. I enjoyed Reilly's class. And would retake her.

This review is for Dr. Reilly for Chem 14D. Coming into this class, I thought I was screwed for two big reasons: I was awful at gen chem and therefore thought I was awful at all chem, and the quarter prior I took 14C with a brand new and very scattered professor who I don't believe got through all of the material we should have covered. We definitely hit the ground running with Dr. Reilly, as 14D is a lot to begin with but she also recognized that a lot of us had gaps in our fundamental ochem knowledge. However, even though she oftentimes spoke really *really* fast and covered A LOT of material in the span of each 50 minute lecture, she is the most patient, thorough, and articulate professor I've had at UCLA so far. She went out of her way for her students, posting tutorials on confusing (14C AND 14D) topics, posting pdf and video answer keys for each week's discussion worksheet, having super flexible and helpful office hours. Her tests were hard and both midterms had averages in the 60s. But they were completely and entirely fair. If nothing else, Amber Reilly is an incredibly fair professor. Ochem was definitely hard, but professor Reilly really holds your hand as much as she can throughout the course. I imagine she's just as fairminded, generous, and thorough in her other classes as well, so I highly recommend taking organic chemistry or whatever else with Dr. Reilly.