I recently found a great article which discusses chemical intuition and what one can do to develop it. The main points:
- Don’t ignore the obvious, such as a chemical’s color in relation to its structure.
- Get a feel for energetics – how much energy does it take to break a hydrogen bond? This matters in all sorts of investigations, such as solvation free energy, protein-ligand binding, chemical reactions, etc.
- Stay in touch with the basics, and learn from other fields. It’s easy to forget everything after a class ends, but the basics help to keep sight of the bigger picture, and better understand and relate important concepts. From the article,
An old professor of mine used to recommend flipping open an elementary chemistry textbook every day to a random page and reading ten pages from it. …
This also involves keeping in touch with other fields of chemistry since an organic chemist never knows when a basic fact from his college inorganic chemistry textbook will come in handy.
Intuition comes from experience. But, instead of intuition growing linearly with time, that growth can be catalyzed by some of these suggestions. It’s something I’ve gotta work on for goddamn sure.