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Originally Posted by Dsmoody23
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I'd be curious if any of you current students could confirm or deny, but I'm preparing for it like boot camp. Before I headed to boot camp, I spent a lot of time doing push ups, pull ups and running. And that was all well and good, but there's really no amount of preparation that gets you ready to do those push ups with 4 huge guys screaming at you and 1 standing on your back. Preparation helps, but there's a certain aspect of it all that you can't wrap your mind around until you actually get there and do it.
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I'm not sure preparing helps at all. But could be because I'm just an unmotivated person who can't get myself to get with the program unless I have to. Like... for instance, I'm pretty sure if I studied for the GRE verbal section for like 2 days, I could probably get 95% of anything vocab related questions right because I've gotten so good at rote memorization now. Back when I was studying for the GRE's though... oh man it took me fooooorever to memorize those friggin words. Maybe if I had military strength discipline, it would be a different story.
To the OP: No matter how much you want to go into it "to learn" and not just to shove things in short term memory, there WILL be a fair amount of shoving and purging. Because there are a ton of clinically irrelevant crap that they make you study for every test that 80-90% of the clinicians out in practice would not be able to answer simply because that knowledge is a waste of brain space.
And also, when you first start vet school first year, don't stress too much if it seems like things don't stick. The first time you learn about Cushing's or something, it'll seem soooo overwhelming because there is so much to know. It's like impossible to understand and then retain every aspect of it, even if it seems very important. BUT the secret is, this disease will be covered multiple times in a ton of different classes, and you will pick up and retain more and more of it every time. By the end of 2nd year, it feels like a lot of things are really repetitive. Same thing with when you start your bug parade. Soooo many bugs with soooo many diseases with soooo many mechanisms. It's really hard to keep things straight for the exam, nevermind afterwards. But again, by the end of second year, many of these bugs keep coming back over and over and over again. It gets reinforced when you're doing pharmacology and you're learning about antibiotics. Or clin path or medicine classes or what have you. That's not to say there isn't still a ton of information. But I think there's a lot less to stress about than most people are compelled to feel initially.