Anna Ghurbanyan

For context, I got an A+ both semesters. General content listed at end. I think it is the same across all sections and professors. I LOVEEEEEEE Anna down. Organic chemistry is hard, and she tried her best to make it digestable. She genuinely wants EVERYONE to understand. I found her quizzes to be VERY fair. I will say though, office hours are a MUST. She makes her homeworks hard so that you have to engage. However, if you go to her (or any TA's) office hours, they will help you with the answers. So just give it your best run through then go to OH, check your answers, and submit. Not anything terrible. Because they are so willing to help, I would not say the difficulty of the homeworks subtracts from my overall enjoyment of the course. It was good quiz prep. I could go on about how the notebooks are unnecessarily tedious, but all sections are the same, so it is just a necessary evil you have to accept to take this course. The lab reports are HARD. Not undoable, but just an INVESTMENT. Never got below a 97 on one, but you really have to sit with the experiment and make sure you understand why you did EVERY step. They would take me quite a bit of time though that did result in one very sleepless week. However, again, they are a great intellectual exercise and I did turn in each one with a genuine understanding of the chemistry of that experiment, down to the nitty gritty details.…

Reviews made this class sound much worse than it ended up being. I got an A+ with relatively little effort; lots of extra credit opportunities (literally enough for 5% of your grade), and the only difficult parts were the quizzes but even then they were manageable if you studied a bit in advance. Going to OH is incredibly helpful since Anna goes over entire HW in them. Anna is a great professor and very helpful, though her lectures can be a bit fast for some

I want to start off by saying that I really enjoyed the lab section of the course, and the time spent doing the experiments. However, outside of lab, this class has a lot of work and requires a lot of time management and planning to make sure you don't fall behind. Anna and the TAs are supportive throughout the course, but I have learned it is vital to take the initiative to reach out to them to answer your questions and get help on the homework and quizzes when you are confused. The course is recommended to take at the same time with orgo II lecture which will help solidify the content of orgo II that will be tested on in both lecture and lab. This is especially true for orgo II lab where the quizzes and amount of work is disproportionate to the 1.5 credits.

Use the support, go to office hours, and you will be successful. But it's a frustrating course and doesn't seem to align with orgo lectures. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2024 Course: CHEMUN2493_004_2024_3-ORGANICCHEM.LABITECHNIQUES : CHEMUN2493_004_2024_3 - ORGANIC CHEM. LAB I TECHNIQUES Instructor: Anna Ghurbanyan

did fine without attending rec 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2023 Course: CHEMUN2445_007_2023_3-ORGANICCHEMISTRY-REC : CHEMUN2445_007_2023_3 - ORGANIC CHEMISTRY - REC Instructor: Christopher Eckdahl

Coming from someone who did well in this class, Anna Ghurbanyan is truly a mean-spirited person. She claims to care for her students, but in reality, she is apathetic and has no grasp of what it is truly reasonable to expect (from college undergraduates, or really, from any mortal person). Example: every lecture goes 10 minutes over the allotted time (which, in my book, is already disrespectful), but the real kicker is that she will yell at and insult any student who tries to leave while she is still speaking. Another example: once, before class, she asked: "is everyone ready to take this quiz?" and one student (the poor soul) jokingly responds, "no!" Anna did not take this as a joke; rather, she got extremely mad and began ranting about how hard she had worked to make this test and how we ought to do well. Third, related Anna-ism: on the front of every test, she will write "please do well"---with a smiley face, of course. The worst thing about this is that I think she truly believes it is inspirational. Oh, Anna.

As many a review have mentioned before -- this is a lot of work for a 1.5 credit class, no doubt. However, Anna makes a rather difficult experience pretty enjoyable! She is very accommodating and I found her late policy to be very lenient (1pt/day late). She is also very funny and enjoys getting to know her students! While this definitely was a time consuming class, I feel like I was able to make the most of it with the help of the TAs and Anna. One thing I will note is that you absolutely should reach out for help if you need it because they are great at being straight up with you in OHs, but otherwise it can be a bit of a struggle to figure out the style of questions and lab reports otherwise.

Learned lab techniques, how to conduct ourselves in a lab setting, how to simulate organic chemistry and analyze data

If I'm being honest – like brutally honest – this class is horrendous. The laboratories are fine I guess, but the amount of work given does not reflect this class's 1.5 credits. Although I'm sure that at least someone enjoyed this course, I most certainly did not. I think this class takes the prize for my least favorite class I've taken at Columbia – a position soon to be challenged by next semester's Organic Chemistry lab I'm sure. To begin with, in this class you have to attend office hours to learn how to solve problem sets and prepare for quizzes because the information that we need to solve problems is often not covered in lecture. Sometimes the essential information we need is not even present in the lecture's supplemental reading or slides. In my opinion, office hours should be an additional resource available for students, not a requisite to understand the class. Assignments like the lab reports illustrate a common theme in the class: busy work. Other examples include p-sets where we had to look up different molecules’s dipole moments – an activity that had no pedagogical value whatsoever and seemed to be written with the sole intention of wasting our time. Furthermore, the lab reports are graded in such a way that to get the best grade possible, you have to write a repetitive, generic lab report. You are graded based on an arbitrary rubric that we are not given before…

Organic chemistry techniques: recrystallization, TLC analysis, reflux, NMR and IR spectral analysis.