Who Is The Organic Chemistry Tutor

Why He Popped Up On Your Feed

He went from random organic chemistry videos to a properly sized channel in maybe three years, and now he's basically the default recommendation when your professor's lecture stops making sense at 2 AM. His real name is Jesse Mason. He films himself solving problems straight on camera with a digital notebook, talks at a medium pace, and covers everything from general chemistry to linear algebra, thermodynamics, and physics. The channel doesn't look polished. It's supposed to be the opposite of polished. You're watching someone work through a 25-step mechanism or a multipart problem the way they'd actually solve it on an exam. That's just the channel name. It's a bit misleading if you think it's only organic chemistry, which is a weird branding choice. He has full courses on calculus, physics, fluid mechanics, differential equations, and even some electrical engineering topics. Organic chemistry is what got him started and what still pulls the most views, but saying he's just an organic chemistry tutor would be like saying a hardware store only sells hammers. I found that out the hard way during my undergrad when I was juggling both O-Chem and engineering mechanics and kept going back for different subjects without realizing he covered them too. I didn't watch his videos passively. That doesn't work for this material. I'd pause after he set up the problem, try to solve it myself, then play it back and compare my setup to his. With reaction mechanisms, I'd trace along on scrap paper, not just stare at the screen. For physical chemistry stuff like thermodynamics and kinetics, I'd mute the audio and work through the algebra myself first because the math is where most people actually fall apart, not the chemistry concepts.

Here's a specific edge case that tripped me up. I was reviewing a video on SN1 versus SN2 mechanisms where he went through regiochemistry and stereochemistry together. I got confused about when a carbocation would undergo a hydride shift versus a methyl shift. His explanation was technically correct, but he didn't explicitly walk through the ranking criteria. So I went into the comments and found another viewer had asked a nearly identical question, and someone linked to a shorter video in his organic chemistry playlist that focused purely on rearrangement stability rules. That's how this channel works in practice. The main videos are broad. The niche details often hide in the related playlist videos or comment section threads. Another thing I learned: his timestamps are unusually good for YouTube. I'd jump directly to a specific subsection instead of rewinding or fast-forwarding through twenty minutes of setup. If you're searching for something specific like resonance structures or NMR spectroscopy, just type the topic plus his channel name into YouTube and click the timestamp. It saves probably ten minutes per search.

The Problems Nobody Talks About

He explains procedures, not intuition. I've seen students ace the homework by copying his steps, then hit a wall on exams that asked the same concept from a slightly different angle. His videos teach you to recognize problem types and follow a recipe. That gets you through most undergraduate courses, but it breaks down when you need to explain why something happens in a written response. You'll get the right answer on a multiple choice test, but your professor will still mark you down if you can't justify the electron movement in a paragraph. The videos are also long. A single mechanism walkthrough can run forty-five minutes to an hour. I've learned to speed them up to 1.25x or 1.5x for topics I already understand, and only watch at normal speed for genuinely new material. Don't listen at full length to something you're just reviewing. It's a waste of time. There's also a coverage gap. He doesn't do lab techniques. If your course requires a lab report on recrystallization or distillation, his channel won't help. He also barely touches biochemistry beyond basic amino acid naming. For that you need separate resources. And his organic chemistry coverage of pericyclic reactions and advanced synthesis is thin. He'll get you through sophomore-level mechanisms, but if you're taking a junior-level synthesis course, you'll outgrow his content quickly.

When His Approach Fails Completely

Don't use his videos if you're trying to learn a topic before your professor has introduced it at all. His teaching style assumes you have some baseline context. He jumps straight into work. If you've never seen a Lewis structure or don't know what a mole is, watching his mechanistic videos will be noise. You'll understand zero percent of it and waste an hour. Start with a more structured course like MIT OpenCourseWare or your textbook's chapter summaries first, then come back to his problem-solving videos. Also, his content assumes you're doing calculations by hand. He shows pencil-on-paper work. If you need to use software like ChemDraw for drawing mechanisms or Gaussian for computational chemistry, his videos won't cover that. That's a different skill entirely and you'll need specialized tutorials for it.

A Quick Walkthrough For Getting The Most Out Of It

Search for the topic you're stuck on plus his channel name. Use the timestamp feature to jump to the relevant section. Pause the video at the problem statement, attempt it yourself on paper, then watch his solution and compare each step. Note where your approach diverged. Re-do any step you got wrong, not just the final answer. Move on only when you can reconstruct the full problem without looking. For organic chemistry specifically, work through his stereochemistry and mechanism videos in order. They build on each other sequentially, and skipping ahead will leave gaps you'll regret during exam review. I've used his content for roughly four semesters across different subjects. It's not perfect. It's not deep enough for graduate-level work. But for getting through a standard undergraduate chemistry sequence and understanding how to actually solve the problems your professors assign, it's one of the most reliable free resources available. Just don't treat it as a complete education. It's a supplement. A very good one, but a supplement nonetheless.