Originally Posted by mo42

O-chem at the University of Illinois focuses heavily on reaction mechanisms. You have to figure out how things will react and what they will form based on general principles (or special cases for things like Bromine). Synthesis questions like the one posted by Hektore are fairly common, although his question would probably be one of the more difficult ones.

It's not bad once you understand why things react the way they do; if you can do that rather than memorize individual reactions over and over, you'll do well. Not that you won't have to do a lot of memorization, just less than most people.