Today I heard a chem talk given by a computational organic chemist Jim Duncan, a prof from our neighboring liberal arts school, Lewis and Clark, who publishes research (has a few in the Journal of Organic Chemistry) on concerted cyclizations and rearrangements. Much of it was well over my head, as I don't have the greatest grounding in theoretical organic chemistry (I mean, I learned Diels-Alder in sophomore organic...yup, that's about it). I know nothing about the Woodward-Hoffman Rules or Frontier Orbital Theory save that they exist, and most of my organic training thus far has been thoroughly grounded in synthesis where it's okay to hand-waive mechanisms to a degree, because what really matters is what the end result is. Pat, the prof who I took organic II, worked for over the summer, and am taking adv. synth from now, like most synthetic chemists, sees mechanisms largely as a tool to evaluate reactivity. He stresses mechanisms--in fact, most of our problem sets are figuring out mechanisms of named reactions that are analogs to simpler reactions we already know but the course is...well...aimed at preparing us to be able to pick up a synthetic paper and be able to read it. It's kind of mind-boggling to me that there are people whose entire carriers are devoted to performing very complicated calculations on the computer about chemistry to determine the mechanistic basis for how reactions work at an orbital level. One of my other professors does this (although he still takes thesis students who do wet work in synthesis as well), and I may eventually take that class (adv. mechanistic organic) depending on how things pan out next year. Well, we'll see. It's something I'd like to know more about, might enjoy taking a class in, but at the end of the day am glad someone else has a passion for it.