Reviewing the Premed Courses (Part 2)

By: Nathan Kim ‘24

This is the second of a three-part series I’m doing to review the premed courses I’ve taken at USC. Feel free to check out my previous post where I review general biology (BISC 120/121 and BISC 220/221) and general chemistry (CHEM 105A/115A and CHEM 105B/115B)! In this post, I will be going over the organic chemistry series, biochemistry, and statistics.

CHEM 322A

Starting with the first organic chemistry class, I wanted to preface this by saying that I took this class at a community college in the summer so that I could take CHEM 322B and BISC 330 in the fall semester of my sophomore year because it best fit with my schedule of taking the MCAT in the summer after my sophomore year. Thus, although the professor may be different, the content is mostly the same, and I will expand more on taking a science prerequisite course at a community college.  This class was laying the basic foundations of organic chemistry, so it covered many topics broadly like stereochemistry, reactions, and spectroscopy. Coming into this class, I thought it would be pretty similar to general chemistry but that was farther from the truth. Although there were minor similarities, it was like a whole new language to me, and I needed to put in consistent hard work to learn this whole new subject. Even though I had to put in a ton of work, it was probably one of the most interesting science classes I’ve taken along with a solid professor, so I rate it an 8/10. This class was online, so I had to do online labs, which were also much easier than doing them in-person. Essentially, this was a synchronous summer class that was 18 weeks crunched into 6 weeks, so I had to dedicate most of my time in the day to studying for this class to do well. For studying, I recommend constantly doing practice problems because it’s only through struggling through the problems and seeing where your logic has gone wrong that you can fix those mistakes.

CHEM 322B

For the second organic chemistry class, I took it during my first in-person semester at USC after quarantine. This was the hardest class I ever took in my life because I had to learn endless reactions and memorize the movement of electrons in mechanisms. It wasn’t difficult to the point where I couldn’t understand it, but it was that it was moderately difficult on top of the sheer amount of content that made it overwhelming for me to study. I think it was also because it was my first semester on-campus that made it harder for me to do as well as I could’ve. However, although it was extremely difficult, it was also more interesting than CHEM 322A for me, so I rate it a 9/10. It was my first time doing an in-person lab, and reality hit me that doing the actual experiments and writing up the pre-, in-, and post-labs would take a significant amount of effort and time. I had to give up a lot of my free time to study for this class because if I didn’t, I would be completely lost quickly. This class had a surprisingly huge curve (like around a whole letter grade bump-up), so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.

BISC 330

This was the other in-person science class I took after quarantine, and I didn’t have too rough of a time learning in this class. I thought it was mostly a repeat of biology except for it being more in-depth, and even though I could’ve done better, I had an enjoyable time learning mostly about metabolism and the reactions that happen in our body. Thus, I would rate it a 7/10 because it was a relatively chill class without much homework, but I still invested a good amount of time studying the systems and processes on the weekends. Having this lab on top of my organic chemistry lab was definitely a challenge because of the energy and time I needed to invest to do well in each lab. This class also had a rather large curve because the tests, which were both multiple choice and free response, weren’t the easiest to do well in and required intentional effort to memorize all the pathways. Out of all the STEM classes that I’ve taken, I’d say this is one of the classes that is not too hard to do well in, but I’d recommend being wise with what other science class you pair this with because it is still tough.

PSYC 274

I took this class during my spring semester of freshman year, and I thought it was the most chill STEM class that I’ve taken (maybe because of my professor as well?). There was a solid chunk of work that I always had to do for class, but other than that, there wasn’t too much homework outside of class. It was the first statistics class that I’ve ever taken, but I didn’t have too hard of a time doing well. The class was a broad overview of the field of statistics (with a small focus on psychology), so the things we learned weren’t that challenging to wrap your head around. There was a lab section where we used a computer program to process data and apply statistical principles, but it was easy and straightforward as well. As a result, I’d rate this a 5/10 because it was slightly interesting and easy for the most part. I don’t have too much to say about this class except that choosing the right professor is important so that one wouldn’t need to spend too much effort in doing well. Essentially, there’s just a lot of simple math that you will need to do, and the most difficult part was learning what certain calculations could be applied in different situations.

Stay tuned for the final part, Part 3!

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