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Course Description

The Instructors

Other Organic Faculty

Schedule

CHEM 211 Organic Chemistry I with Laboratory

Course Description

In Chemistry 211, laboratory students will investigate the world of organic chemistry while learning various reactions and a wide range of laboratory techniques and instruments.

Students will become familiar with the nomenclature and behavior of organic functional groups through reactions and instrumental analysis. Various reactions including nucleophilic substitution, dehydration, and oxidation will be used to synthesize new compounds from starting materials.

Students will be able to utilize a variety of instruments, including FTIR (Fourier transform infrared) spectroscopy and GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry), to determine the success of their reactions. Traditional organic laboratory techniques such as TLC (thin layer chromatography), column chromatography, extraction, and fractional distillation will also be used.

Students will be given the opportunity to work on two projects in the course of the lab. Working with a partner in a 3-part experiment, students will identify two unknown compounds from physical property data (melting points, boiling points, FTIR spectra, GC-MS, refractometry, and polarimetry data) and reaction chemistry (classification tests). Each student will also design a synthetic experiment on her own, using knowledge she has gained throughout the semester. The purpose of this experiment is for the student to create a hypothesis and to see if her hypothesis will be supported experimentally.

Prerequisite: 105 or 120 or permission of the department.

Distribution: Natural and Physical Science

Semester: Fall, Spring

Unit: 1.25