Bumping this thread up...surely there are more things to say now that most of you have spent at least a week in classes... :)

Hope everyone's having fun!!!

I'm having fun...so far.

We got our dog in anatomy this past Thursday and are working our way down the muscles of the thoracic limb. Some of the classes have been kinda review to make sure we got what we were supposed to out of undergrad. The intro to PBL has been a learning experience though. Especially to me with little clinical experience. I'm looking forward to today, the wildlife hospital is doing an orientation on feeding and care-taking of their resident birds of prey!

Doing alright. I feel behind already with all the muscles I need to know but other than that...

Next week I get to take care of an ostrich for a week. Also have my first exam.

They've designed our schedule so we get a small break on Mondays, go all day Tuesday, and then it's a lot better from there, so past Tuesday it's pretty good. Tuesday is pretty evil though but at least it's 2 lectures and 3 labs (vs Monday where it's three hours of sitting in the same class room).

All in all, it's pretty easy so far, but I don't know how long that's going to last.

farm animal husbandry and techniques
 

Our first week at Illinois was pretty interesting, and we all had quite different experiences. My first rotation was Farm Animal Husbandry and Techniques so we got to do physical exams on goats, cows, horses and sheep. They taught us how to draw blood from pigs and cows, and we even got to do the infamous rectal palpations-in our first week! We got to be involved in seeing some cases that came into the large animal teaching hospital. pretty exciting stuff. i'm digging the new Illinois curriculum so far. my next rotation is Ophthamology, and so you have an idea..my other class mates are in rotations like:
Diagnostics, Oncology, Imaging, SUrgical skills, anesthesia, equine medicine and surgery, exotic pet management, rehabilitation medicine, small animal ER, dentistry and wildlife medicine, to name just a few.

Y'all get to do rotations your first year?

We kinda get to do some but it's only for a week each semester. Not a throughout the year thing. To do 'rotations' at A&M you have to join a club or do them on your lunch break.

well, i survived orientation. yesterday was pretty long and we sat through lectures all day, then had the white coat ceremony at night.
today we did 'team-building'. a little lame but still fun overall and a good way to get to know people better.
tonight everyone in my class is going out to the bar with their big sibs, but i can't go because i'm not 21 and the bars around here won't let me in. so that sucks =\

yes! that's the whole schtick of Illinois' new curriculum-the first 8 weeks are a lot like 4th year rotations, just 1 week each. we start in on lectures after that, but it gets your feet wet right away and its fun.

It's been a pretty good first week here. Orientation lasted Monday and Tuesday, and classes started on Wednesday. It's mostly review so far, although I can already tell that anatomy's going to be brutal. I got to fly a hawk over at the wild & exotic animals club, and that was my first time handling a bird of prey, so that was really cool.

There is a lot of partying! Drinking age here is 19, so everyone here can drink and they drink a lot! Had a party on Monday, Wednesday was initiation/hazing night for the first years, and Friday was Beer Night (burger + all-you-can-drink beer for $4 from 8-10pm), but I was kinda partied out by Friday so I didn't go.

I know how that feels. I don't mind not being able to buy alcohol, but I find it a little frustrating that my age prevents me from joining in on some social events. How about trying to initiate gatherings in other venues? Dog playgroups at the park are always fun.

WOW! That's amazing! We don't get any hands on animal experience here at LSU until halfway through 3rd year when we enter clinics. The most action we got to see was performing a neuro exam on our research dogs. lol.

ME TOO! lol Tues-bar, Wed-trivia night@ bar and party later, Thur-vet frat party, Fri-house party, i do not want to go out tonight but.....one of my classmates has a birthday on Sunday so we are going out to the bars tonight to celebrate. odear god... i am staying sober tonight though to prepare for first day of classes Monday!!

completely agreed. I'm the youngest one in my class and I knew it would be a problem coming in, but I thought that I would just deal with it for the first semester (I turn 21 February 1...not that i'm counting down or anything.) but at this point, i feel like i'm really missing out on making friends and that everyone is going to already have found people to hang with by the time classes start on monday =\
i know i'm probably over-reacting, but for the past 3-4 nights people have been going out to the bars and i've been at home by myself.
oh well. i would love to do a dog playgroup at the park but my dog is dog-aggressive so that doesn't work out too well =\ hopefully after this weekend people will have less time to party so it won't be as bad. until the fall semester CVM bar-crawl in 3 weeks, that is...

I've made it through a week of orientation and three weeks of classes.

So far, I've gotten to do a bunch of physical exams on dogs, run bloodwork and differentials, and sit through a pathology club lecture on identifying pathological bone changes in fossils. In the next few weeks I get to do a "rotation" with sheep, one with horses, and another on our school's mobile clinic.

Orientation sucked. It was 5 days long, plus half a day on Saturday for the white coat ceremony. 2 of those days were us being subjected to two vets who wish they were inspirational speakers, and teambuilding activities, and all sorts of other stuff that made me wish I could just have an icepick shoved into my eye socket instead of having to deal with it. The other 3 days were more university specific - random talks about how to get tutors, tech support, info on the library, plus some "practice" PBL sessions.

I'm really loving the PBL. It's time consuming - you spend your time in class identifying what you don't know, then have to spend half of your time at home researching stuff, and half of your time studying whatever you researched. But after getting to sit through 3 weeks of it, my tolerance for sitting through lectures when we have them has plummeted. And our last case was really frustrating. We never found out what disease our horse had, because before we could run definitive tests on it, it was struck by lightning. (Apparently, all of our PBL cases are based on real cases, so somebody's real horse did get hit by lightning before its problems were resolved.)

Anatomy's freaking me out. We should pretty much know the pelvic limb by now, and I constantly feel like I'm behind the curve. There may have been a couple breakdowns (centered around anatomy) where I contemplated getting a moving truck and going home. But I think I'm over that now.

We had a keg at our dog playgroup :D

Was technically a mixer but was at a park, and people brought dogs, so yeh.

No animal contact via classes for us yet either but club night is coming up so I'm hoping getting involved will lead to some opportunities to practice technical skills.
Classes are pretty intense so far. Tues/Thurs are probably the worst since we have 4 solid hours of lecture and 3 hours of anatomy lab. Monday/Wednesday/Friday have more consecutive lectures/labs but because we don't have physio lab every week we sometimes get out a little earlier.
I'm finding what a lot of people told me is very true in that the material itself is really pretty straight forward and uncomplicated so far but the sheer volume is overwhelming. The first week of classes felt roughly equal to two months of undergrad work to me. You just have to keep at it everyday. I took one night off during the week of summarizing/condensing my notes from the day and it took me multiple days to catch up because it piled up so quickly.
I'm not too worried about anatomy just yet but I also took a graduate level anatomy course during undergrad so I'm having to re-memorize a lot of the terminology but finding the structures is coming back pretty easy. I think a lot of my classmates are most overwhelmed by that aspect since they've never dissected before and feel a little lost.
Anyway, so far so good. We have three quizzes next week so we'll see how those go. I won't lie and say that I'm having the best time ever in vet school but I don't mind the work load b/c I do know this is where I'm supposed to be. We'll see if things change as classes pick up!

I suppose us MSU sdners should have met up at orientation the other day...don't worry, MSUspartan, I'm not one of the people who's going out all the time (can't really hold my alcohol too well even though I've technically had 7 years of legal drinking behind me) and I would love to meet up and do non-drinking activities...feel free to PM me :)

So this is my first post after attending classes!!! it has been 3 days. We have had all of our classes except wildlife, our MBA cert. program, and our clinical one. I LOVE it so far though. Anatomy is awesome and even though it is a shtload of stuff to memorize it is still the best part of my day. My group has gone into the lab after hours to catch up on stuff and review material. Oh, btw, did i mention Gellabella is in my group!! :love: Biochem is review so far but I am still fearing it because I know how hard it can get later. Developmental bio was all new stuff for me so i need to read up on that.

I'm not sure how i'll feel after my second week but i love everything so far. We do all the bones and muscles in the whole dog body (except head) within 2.5 weeks and then we start with the nerves, veins, arteries... Our first anatomy exam isn't until the end of the month and it is on the whole dog. i'm a little nervous because there is no "practice" small exam just BOOM whole body lol

Different people, different experiences:D
I found Developmental bio soporific. Fell asleep for the first time ever in the middle of a class. :o

So I had the first super tough test in vet school. It was the last one in my immunology class. I can't believe we are already done with 2 classes!! (they are like half semester classes). Has anyone else had a test? How do you think it was?

Our first test is Physiology on Sept. 10. I'm a little nervous, mostly because I don't know what to expect!

So far, I like all of my classes, especially the more hands-on ones like anatomy and Physical Diagnosis (bovine labs for the past 3 weeks!). However, we have bacteriology at 8 a.m., and it's so hard to stay awake!

Our first test is Immunology this next Monday, but it appears that it's going to be super easy.

Then: Anatomy on Friday. It's like you hit a little speed bump along the way to mounting the brick wall.

Wow we just had our first anatomy exam this past week. That's good for you though. The less material on it the better! What all will be covered on it? I've already taken 8 exams

Whoa. Y'all must have had a **** load of anatomy to study then!

It'll be the thoracic limb (muscles [origin, insertion, action, names], bones and bone topography, and...other bits [features like the transverse humeral retinaculum, lymph nodes, palpations, stuff like that) and maybe a bit of the hind end.

I'm going to represent all of the Davis 2014'ers and quickly pop in to say that today was our first day of Orientation :D We start classes for real on September 10th, and between now and then we have more Orientation and our White Coat Ceremony. I'm glad to see that the excitement hasn't worn off for those who have already been in school for a while!

Hey Moose Nanny, you should change your status to vet student now. ;)

edit: Ugh, I forgot how horrible sitting still all day is. I really lost my attention span in the second half of orientation today, and the disorganization at the end was really not helping. I ate froyo and played hockey, and now all is right with the world again. :) Ready for team building tomorrow!!!

Hear hear! I feel you on the bact. at 8 am. Whoever decided that that was a good time for it is committing torture. And PD lab makes my day! I was really surprised by how much I liked cows.

I really really wish our anatomy class was like this. We finished the thoracic limb and there is a lot of stuff to memorize already. I can't imagine doing the whole body for one exam. Whyyy whyyy can't the test be split into sections?!?

startingovervet-i almost fell asleep in biochem yesterday. i hate biochem.

Yeah - we have our first anatomy exam/practical in a week covering the thoracic limb - all of the bones (not hard), muscles - all origins/insertions/actions, nerves - innervations/sensory vs. motor, arteries - including most branches, and veins - including most branches. On top of that we have a whole written test write before the practical. Ughh!!!!

In Minnesota, we just finished up our three days of orientation. I'm really pumped to start classes on Tuesday. We have an AWESOME class and the current students and professors we have met so far are pretty fantastic.

you are lucky, dont take this for granted! good luck!!! :D

We finished three days of orientation/team-building stuff and now we have a day and a half more of orientation next week, optional high ropes course, then real classes start next Friday.

Our class is great too!

And the trust and communication and team building exercises were actually fairly useful and quite fun. :)

Quick, someone tell the site admin that Nyanko's account has been hacked!

Ah no don't worry - I definitely don't take it for granted! Didn't mean to come off that way. It's fantastic that we get to learn all of this stuff - I was just moaning about studying :rolleyes:

:eek: I think you're right!

Love the avatar by the way - I haven't been on in a bit so I don't know how long you've had it, but it's cute!!

Agreed. Even though some of us, including myself, had low expectations going in to the team building exercises, I have been pleasantly surprised by the last two days (first day was a little much sitting and listening to computer/admin stuff). It's been fun and useful to remember that I am surrounded by people who are smart and interesting and motivated, unlike some of the people in my undergrad classes who brought down the whole teamwork experience. Everyone has been friendly and worked pretty well together. Undergrads who are despairing because their chemistry/micro/physics lab partners don't know or care what they're supposed to be doing, have hope! It will get better in vet school. :)

hahahha hilarious. i love your avatar TT!!! i also have no clue it has been like that because i havent been on as much.

it's interesting, i feel like i look at our class of 2014 thread more than i looked at the class of 2013 thread last year. i guess i was too overwhelmed with applying to schools and then waiting to see if i even had a chance of being accepted lol

glad to see UCDavis is going to start soon!! i am so excited for all of us!!!

yesterday during anatomy lab, i was looking for something through the muscles and it just clicked in my head. 'wow, i'm going to be a vet' and i was SO happy.

Week 2 down and still standing! Academically, I think vet school is awesome. Yeah, we've got some boring classes (cowgirla is dead on with ethics). With most of the others, the instructors relate it back to "why do we need to know this" when we get a glazed over look. That strategy helps me out significantly.

The curriculum difficulty isn't anything unmanageable. However, I was internally freaking out before school started. While everyone else was doing *insert squealing girlie voice* "OMG I'm going to vet school and it will be like totally awesome", I was wondering if I could handle the rigor. We all hear about how difficult school is and know how hard we work to get in, instead of squealing (which would never happen anyway) I started to worry. Can I handle it? I can and will NOT be an attrition statistic! Day two of class and all that went away. Now, I just gear down and am doing fine so far (ask me again next week after our first histo and phys exam).

Beyond academics, school feels irritatingly like high school. Maybe it is many of our classmates are barely HS graduates. Ok, that may be a bit dramatic, but it sure feels that way somedays. Unlike some of the other schools that seem to have a number of nontrads, OkSU does not. I think our oldest classmate is 32. They actually had to discuss appropriate attire this week- as in, if I can see your a** cheek sticking out of your shorts, they're too short. I just think she's confused about what profession she's in- maybe that is her version of professional attire. ;) If you can ignore all the social annoyances though, it isn't bad.

I think those who say "vet school was the best time of my life" are actually right. Granted, it's just the end of week two, but I already feel that way. Yeah, it is tough being without the hubby, dogs, family, or friends to go to school. That was a known "cost of attendance" for me. If I can still say that I'm having a great time with all of that, then something is going very right.


* and thanks for the nudge from TT. Temporary falling off the SDN earth has ended :D

Oh, I was just picking. ;)

The buttcheek stuff can't be any worse than what I saw on main campus last week. My swimsuit bottoms cover more than these shorts did - it was ridiculous! Hopefully there are lots of cool people, young or old, to balance out the... less mature (or less clothed) ones.

And if you need some awesome person to hang out with, I'm still around. :d

I can't wait to see opinions 6+ months from now... :p

stop trying to put us down!! lol maybe class of 2014 is just more optimistic :p Honestly, even if i have a major freak out, cry, throw up because im nervous and anything else i can think of, i will still love vet school. Working after undergrad really made me realize there is NOTHING else i want to do with my life.

ps- during an orientation speech someone did say "vet school was the best time of my life" i didn't believe them at first, but i definitely think so now. I've had more fun (even though i was in lab til 9pm studying every night) than i ever did in undergrad. I'm not sure why, but i feel SOOO close to all my classmates and ive only known them a lil over a week??? it feels like a yr already lol

^I felt the same way at the beginning of last year, too. I, too, was all "WOOHOO VETSCHOOL OMGLOL!!!!1" and wondering why all the second years looked so crabby. Now I will be one of those crabby second years... :o
That's not to say I HATE school, because I don't. I'm just not at all looking forward to classes beginning Tuesday. And that's not to say I hate the profession, because I love it. You can love being a vet without loving school.

these are my thoughts exactly. i can't stand how everyone is so focused on what bar they will go out to EVERY friday and saturday night...like there's nothing else to do to hang out with other classmates and enjoy life. the age/maturity differences are a huge struggle for me. and i'm not in the giddy stage of vet school either. i love the classes (even though two are kicking my ass) but the extracurriculars are a struggle and i miss my friends, family, and SO more than i thought possible. and one of our anatomy professors actually had to end one of our lectures by saying "if you look like you're going to work at hooters right after class, it's not appropriate attire."

i agree completely.

I have NEVER seen so much drama in my life and it's only been 2 months. Everyone is all up in everyone else's business. There are already hook ups and break ups and fights and oh lord everything else. It will be interesting to see what all happens

Three weeks into the semester, and the beginning of the the drama is budding (if not blooming here or there). I'm sure that there is more than what I'm aware of, but I'm not in and amongst all of the social extracurricular stuff going on.

You're right it does feel like high school (or at least what I assume high school feels like). With class pictures, lockers, and even a "prom", it seems as if we're going from college backwards.

All that aside, I am enjoying the classes and just the fact of being in vet school. Once the newness wears off, I hope I can still remember how much I wanted to be here.

P.S. I hope (and think) you all know this, but not all of us 21 year olds are wild and immature. Well, :rolleyes: not all of us.

Of course! I didn't mean to stereotype. Although don't many stereotypes have some basis in reality? :rolleyes:

I don't care what your age. Maybe I'm just old fashioned or something, but I have this silly idea that individuals in professional school should act accordingly. I know, it's a crazy idea.

Lol wutever as soon as i get in i'm wearing nothing but tube tops and daisy dukes. becuz thats what i want the professors to think when they see me. "hey now, theres a mature girl with good taste."

Although I'm not terribly excited about Mississippi's dress code as a possibility for myself, I do suppose it has some merits. I just want to be able to wear jeans! Can't they just ban shorts or something? I suppose there's always some other random body part to excessively reveal.

You are right. Usually, more years and more experience creates more maturity. So the inverse of that would make sense that the younger people are going to be less mature.

Before reading c/o 2013...how ya doing thread, I sorta had this naive thought that the people that get in are the mature, hard-working, professional people. That view has evaporated. Hopefully by the end of school, we'll be professional. That may be naive too though...

Have not seen anyone inappropriately dressed. Surprised you guys had to be lectured about it.

I'm not really seeing much drama except little things within PBL groups. Maybe I'm just oblivious to it.

Enjoying vet school overall. Not really enjoying anatomy at all. Just find it so hard to remember everything: bones, muscles, origins, insertions and actions :(

Have two tests and a quiz this week, so we'll see how those go :scared:

TurtleLover: A prom? Are they going to hire a bunch of males from the med school to come?

Good luck rileydog! You'll be fine. :)

Everyone has been nice so far (except for a little drama regarding some housing thing that got aired on the class FB page, then deleted) and I hope that we can remember in 6 months this spirit of cooperation and collegiality. I know, I'm being very optimistic, but one can hope.

According to FB, the students at our vet school go to quite a few pubcrawls. At the latest one, they wore shirts that said "Free Rectals (Don't worry, we're going to be vets)" and drank beer and milk out of those gloves they use for rectal exams on cattle and horses? It looks like they do this every year.

No wonder there was wine in the attic of the clinic I used to volunteer at....

Just curious if the med students around here do the same thing. Maybe I'm overreacting, but doesn't getting drunk at a bar wearing shirts that scream "I'm in vet school!" just a little bit unprofessional?

Then again, they're young and young people are supposed to go out and have a good time...