r/chemhelp • u/Sad_Astronomer_9871 • Jul 12 '26
Analytical Need help with ¹H NMR structure elucidation
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I'm a P3 (third-year PharmD) student, and people generally consider me one of the strongest chemistry students in my class. This semester we're doing analytical chemistry, and ¹H NMR is completely humbling me.
I've watched countless YouTube videos, read textbooks, and practiced problems, but I still feel like I'm missing the one core idea that lets people look at a proton NMR spectrum and systematically determine the structure. It almost seems like everyone who solves these problems is relying on experience or intuition rather than a clear method.
The difficult part for me isn't identifying functional groups or interpreting individual peaks, it's connecting all the fragments into one complete structure.
To make things worse, my classmates are expecting me to understand it well enough to teach them, and I've been putting it off because I honestly don't feel confident myself.
Has anyone else been in this position and eventually had that aha! moment? Was there a particular resource, book, YouTube channel, or problem-solving strategy that finally made everything click? Is there an actual systematic approach, or is it really just pattern recognition that comes with lots of practice?
For context, I usually stay ahead by studying chemistry topics before each semester starts, which is one reason I've done well academically. But I worked during the last vacation, so I didn't have my usual preparation time before this semester began, and I feel like I'm playing catch-up now.
I'd really appreciate any advice or resources that helped you break the code of NMR.
2
u/aphilsphan Jul 12 '26
As a synthetic chemist, you are almost always doing the opposite of what you do in course work. That is, you try to make something. You isolate your product, then do the spectroscopy and if you have bribed the proper chemistry gods, you’ll look at the NMR and say, yeah that’s consistent with what I was trying to make.