Class of 2021 . . . how ya doin?

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My pet peeve during first year was coming in to study only to find someone had dug through our cadaver and cut nerves/vessels or just botched things we worked hard on. At least one person got 'talked to' about it.
oh goodness this happened last semester. My friend had a dog that had beautifully dissected (and the Latex was perfect) pelvic arteries, nerves, and veins. My professor herself had said that she would put that dog on the practical. The night before the exam we went up to study and everything was mangled and destroyed. It was a nightmare.
 
Our anatomy professor took to carrying around superglue and doing spot fixes of things that we had royally mangled. She'd glue it back and tell us to pretend nothing had happened 😛
Haha that's a good idea. Ours just likes to say "why have you done this" followed by "perhaps you can practice your suturing technique. The suture materials are in the drawer over there"

(One of our adjunct professors is the worst offender for destroying dissections. We had a beautiful greater omentum in December and watched it get shredded in front of our eyes. She also cut our accessory nerve. I may have had to leave the lab for a minute because I was laughing and crying simultaneously)
 
We had groups of four for dogs, and groups of 7-8 for our mini horses. And then same larger groups got a goat or a calf near the end of large animal anatomy for ruminant GI stuff.

Edit: and we definitely had issues with people destroying dissections that were not theirs...
 
Nothing is worse than when you perfectly dissect something and you ask a TA a question and they start digging around trying to help and they accidentally break the thing you had just perfected.

hermione-granger-i-trusted-you.gif
 
oh goodness this happened last semester. My friend had a dog that had beautifully dissected (and the Latex was perfect) pelvic arteries, nerves, and veins. My professor herself had said that she would put that dog on the practical. The night before the exam we went up to study and everything was mangled and destroyed. It was a nightmare.
Oh interesting. You inject everything with latex?

And only use some dogs for the practical? Pretty sure every one of our dogs & cats got used for the practicals last semester for at least one 4-part question.
 
Four us we have groups of 3 that get a dog to themselves and we have prosecutions to look at whenever we want. We don't have much horse/cow anatomy unfortunately, at most we have comparative labs and definitely no dissections. There are some prosecutions for us though. Also we are able to use any of these at any point.
Why are you prosecuting poor dead animals? 😱
 
oh goodness this happened last semester. My friend had a dog that had beautifully dissected (and the Latex was perfect) pelvic arteries, nerves, and veins. My professor herself had said that she would put that dog on the practical. The night before the exam we went up to study and everything was mangled and destroyed. It was a nightmare.
Ugh that's awful. Our dissection quality also mattered for our dissection grade, if things were hacked (whether by us or a mystery person), you risk losing points.

Wait this also reminds me of my group's fresh limb dissection disaster. On grading day, everyone was fishing theirs out of the ice bins. I was looking for ours and someone literally took it (ours was done and A+ worthy, the only limbs left were def not done). Our instructor made us start over. Only mildly concerned about the future professionalism/ethics of whoever did it.

Our anatomy professor took to carrying around superglue and doing spot fixes of things that we had royally mangled. She'd glue it back and tell us to pretend nothing had happened 😛
lol I didn't even think of that. I think the only thing I did was accidentally snap one of our phrenic nerves. Everything it ran through was still intact though so it wasn't lost forever. Overall our dissections were pretty good. Some groups had cadavers that looked professionally done though.

Oh interesting. You inject everything with latex?

And only use some dogs for the practical? Pretty sure every one of our dogs & cats got used for the practicals last semester for at least one 4-part question.
Our cadavers came with every vessel filled with latex (blue for a vein, red for an artery). Made life easier, for sure, since some of those vessel walls are so incredibly thin after the preservation process.
 
Oh interesting. You inject everything with latex?

And only use some dogs for the practical? Pretty sure every one of our dogs & cats got used for the practicals last semester for at least one 4-part question.
All of our dogs arteries were injected with red latex. We had prosections with veins injected with blue and about half the cadaver dogs were as well. Was so nice haha
 
Our cadavers came with every vessel filled with latex (blue for a vein, red for an artery). Made life easier, for sure, since some of those vessel walls are so incredibly thin after the preservation process.
All of our dogs arteries were injected with red latex. We had prosections with veins injected with blue and about half the cadaver dogs were as well. Was so nice haha
Omg waaaant

Especially now when the cadavers are older -- it's getting really hard to tell whether the face spaghetti is a nerve, an artery, the parotid duct, evil fascia strand, or ????
 
We had red latex in the aa, but blowouts were common and there was a certain point where you really just needed to dissect by feel. In some ways doing that is useful because you get better at fishing and figuring out how to tell different structures apart, but as the cadavers get older everything kind of just turns into dry sadness if you're not careful.
 
(we do have a couple plastinated specimens and prosections and those are injected with red/blue/yellow for artery/vein/nerve, but I would looooove to have that on our cadavers, too)
 
We used to be able to take pictures and videos of them (providing they don’t go on social media/ get shared outside the school) but our new professor won’t let us. 🙁

He gives us the Popleski images or something like that and 2- 2.5 hours of lab time and then we move on. 😱 Not a single person is moderately ready for the exam
I don’t think I get anything out of dissections. I am dreading oral exams because I can’t identify anything on the real animal. We do dissections without any anatomy lectures so it’s pretty much a s***-show when we are in lab, then they expect us to know it all! If it wasn’t for our dissection videos and VIN 3D anatomy I wouldn’t know anything about anatomy.
 
I'm so jelly rn guys, you have no idea
Latex definitely helped, but was also a huge PITA if you're highly allergic like me...

Spent many a dime on Benadryl that year. Also hated myself when I realized I had my forearm resting on the cadaver for who knows how long, because I would break out in an ugly rash soon

I don’t think I get anything out of dissections. I am dreading oral exams because I can’t identify anything on the real animal. We do dissections without any anatomy lectures so it’s pretty much a s***-show when we are in lab, then they expect us to know it all! If it wasn’t for our dissection videos and VIN 3D anatomy I wouldn’t know anything about anatomy.
If it makes you feel better, we had anatomy lectures and our labs were still a sh** show. we had a different professor than @batsenecal does now, though.
 
Haha that's a good idea. Ours just likes to say "why have you done this" followed by "perhaps you can practice your suturing technique. The suture materials are in the drawer over there"

(One of our adjunct professors is the worst offender for destroying dissections. We had a beautiful greater omentum in December and watched it get shredded in front of our eyes. She also cut our accessory nerve. I may have had to leave the lab for a minute because I was laughing and crying simultaneously)
Our professors would destroy stuff all the time, mainly because they would look at it and realize you were never going to see XYZ thing you needed to see with some portion of other XYZ thing intact. We usually didn't worry too much about it. Some structures they would tell us to look at and appreciate briefly before we just yanked the whole thing off so we could see something else better. Occasionally there were things we had spent a ton of time dissecting that we realized later was totally not necessary to dissect out at all, and these things were rightfully destroyed or abandoned so we could get to what was actually important.

Our professor told us to figure out who our "zen dissectors" and our "hackers" were in the group and for different dissections would tell us who to put on it. 😛 Like "We don't care too much about having you identify these peripheral limb muscles on the horse limb because they were all cut in half anyway we we removed the limbs, so you hackers can chop those off. Put your zen dissectors on the distal limb and pray for them."
 
CSU's virtual canine anatomy used to have a version online free to use, but it looks like it's been taken down. 🙁

We get a copy for dissection and it's a godsend
 
I think it's weird to get graded on how well you do your dissection when the goal is to learn about the structures. I get the nerves and vessels but we have prosections for that. Mostly our dissections are for muscles/organs (though we haven't gotten there yet).
 
CSU's virtual canine anatomy used to have a version online free to use, but it looks like it's been taken down. 🙁

We get a copy for dissection and it's a godsend

I think it's behind a pay wall now? At least, that's what I heard from some classmates. But agreed, we used to use it a lot 🙁

😱
 
I think it's weird to get graded on how well you do your dissection when the goal is to learn about the structures. I get the nerves and vessels but we have prosections for that. Mostly our dissections are for muscles/organs (though we haven't gotten there yet).
Agreed. It's kind of built into it already because if you destroy something you're supposed to know or don't fully dissect it out...that is going to be problematic when you try to learn it haha
 
Agreed. It's kind of built into it already because if you destroy something you're supposed to know or don't fully dissect it out...that is going to be problematic when you try to learn it haha
For us, the grading was moreso to make sure every group actually dissected. I guess in the past before the grading, people would just spend the entire lab period studying the proesctions or mooching off other groups.

We also did not have a lot of prosections. Maybe 1-2 dogs, a cat, a pig, and the horse/cow. Not enough for the entire class to get a fair amount of time to learn them in a 2-3 hour lab
 
I think it's behind a pay wall now? At least, that's what I heard from some classmates. But agreed, we used to use it a lot 🙁
Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to keep it up and running (not to mention hosting it online) and I think the creators were running into a lot of problems where people were using it but not contributing any money toward the project, or people who got a copy and illegally shared it with a ton of other people. I know the professor who runs it once mentioned that at one point he was getting several emails a week from people gushing and thanking him for making the program... from people who never purchased it and didn't even realize it was something they even could purchase or donate to. I do think the VCA is slightly different from a lot of other anatomy resources in that it is much more interactive, constantly updated, and represents years worth of work on the part of those involved, and I think it was probably frustrating to them knowing that it couldn't be improved further without more monetary buy in from those using it. I wonder if putting it behind a paywall was just the next step in the program development process for them, but I'm not sure.
 
And coop, as per usual I'm crying inside from you saying you don't have to know nerves & vessels. :arghh:Halp. Lol
I think she was saying they don't have to dissect them out themselves, not that they don't have to know them...right? Please say that's right lol
 
Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to keep it up and running (not to mention hosting it online) and I think the creators were running into a lot of problems where people were using it but not contributing any money toward the project, or people who got a copy and illegally shared it with a ton of other people. I know the professor who runs it once mentioned that at one point he was getting several emails a week from people gushing and thanking him for making the program... from people who never purchased it and didn't even realize it was something they even could purchase or donate to. I do think the VCA is slightly different from a lot of other anatomy resources in that it is much more interactive, constantly updated, and represents years worth of work on the part of those involved, and I think it was probably frustrating to them knowing that it couldn't be improved further without more monetary buy in from those using it. I wonder if putting it behind a paywall was just the next step in the program development process for them, but I'm not sure.
Yeah I mean that is totally fair. I can't even imagine the time and effort that was put into that, let alone server costs. I just wish our school would like, include subscriptions in our tuition cost or something. Or build one of our own, but that seems redundant.
 
Unfortunately it takes a lot of money to keep it up and running (not to mention hosting it online) and I think the creators were running into a lot of problems where people were using it but not contributing any money toward the project, or people who got a copy and illegally shared it with a ton of other people. I know the professor who runs it once mentioned that at one point he was getting several emails a week from people gushing and thanking him for making the program... from people who never purchased it and didn't even realize it was something they even could purchase or donate to. I do think the VCA is slightly different from a lot of other anatomy resources in that it is much more interactive, constantly updated, and represents years worth of work on the part of those involved, and I think it was probably frustrating to them knowing that it couldn't be improved further without more monetary buy in from those using it. I wonder if putting it behind a paywall was just the next step in the program development process for them, but I'm not sure.
I had no idea there was even a payment option before

In any case I used that one quite a bit too, depending on the cost it might be worth it
 
Our professors would destroy stuff all the time, mainly because they would look at it and realize you were never going to see XYZ thing you needed to see with some portion of other XYZ thing intact. We usually didn't worry too much about it. Some structures they would tell us to look at and appreciate briefly before we just yanked the whole thing off so we could see something else better. Occasionally there were things we had spent a ton of time dissecting that we realized later was totally not necessary to dissect out at all, and these things were rightfully destroyed or abandoned so we could get to what was actually important.

Our professor told us to figure out who our "zen dissectors" and our "hackers" were in the group and for different dissections would tell us who to put on it. 😛 Like "We don't care too much about having you identify these peripheral limb muscles on the horse limb because they were all cut in half anyway we we removed the limbs, so you hackers can chop those off. Put your zen dissectors on the distal limb and pray for them."
This is actually reminding me, we have one anatomy professor who loved breaking random things while he would give more practical anatomy demonstrations (things like "this is where'd you'd place a tracheostomy tube and why" sort of presentations). He loved sneaking up on dissectors and starting his demos without warning... including performing spontaneous tracheostomies on unsuspecting canine cadavers :laugh:

Students were always horrified when he did this, so our anatomy professor warned us about it in lecture one day and he complained that she ruined his fun 😛
 
I had no idea there was even a payment option before

In any case I used that one quite a bit too, depending on the cost it might be worth it
If I'm reading it right, it's $30. Not sure if that's a recurring subscription cost or a one time thing, but if it's the latter that's cheaper than any anatomy text. And also more helpful.
 
I had no idea there was even a payment option before

In any case I used that one quite a bit too, depending on the cost it might be worth it
Current price from what I can see is $30 for the flash drive with VCA 3.0 on it. Not sure how or when it would be delivered (since it's mainly purchased by first years or undergrads/grads in their respective undergrad anatomy classes).
 
If I'm reading it right, it's $30. Not sure if that's a recurring subscription cost or a one time thing, but if it's the latter that's cheaper than any anatomy text. And also more helpful.
It should be a one time cost to just buy the flash drive with the program downloaded onto it, from my understanding. I could probably ask the professor about it on Monday, he teaches our neurobiology course this semester.
 
It should be a one time cost to just buy the flash drive with the program downloaded onto it, from my understanding. I could probably ask the professor about it on Monday, he teaches our neurobiology course this semester.
That's not a bad price at all. I mean people buy a ton of stuff to try and learn anatomy-expensive flashcards, coloring books, etc. Everyone knows this program is extremely helpful so it's worth it imo.
 
I think she was saying they don't have to dissect them out themselves, not that they don't have to know them...right? Please say that's right lol
I think she mentioned on snap that they do their anatomy in blocks, so they're in their musculoskeletal block right now (and thusly just learning muscles and bones and that sort of thing right now) and they'll have their Nerves & Vessels block later in the semester.
 
I think she mentioned on snap that they do their anatomy in blocks, so they're in their musculoskeletal block right now (and thusly just learning muscles and bones and that sort of thing right now) and they'll have their Nerves & Vessels block later in the semester.
That's what I figured. Nerves in their neuro block.
 
I don’t think I get anything out of dissections. I am dreading oral exams because I can’t identify anything on the real animal. We do dissections without any anatomy lectures so it’s pretty much a s***-show when we are in lab, then they expect us to know it all! If it wasn’t for our dissection videos and VIN 3D anatomy I wouldn’t know anything about anatomy.
I used CSU’s virtual anatomy all the time. And then Minnesota/ Wisconsin/ some North school’s brain anatomy.

I signed up for VIN for the 3D Anatomy- how do I make the daily emails stop????
How are we supposed to dick around on there now and try to guess things?!?!?! @cdoconn
hmph. I’m angry now! I don’t know!! (We were soooo bad.)
 
And coop, as per usual I'm crying inside from you saying you don't have to know nerves & vessels. :arghh:Halp. Lol
I think she was saying they don't have to dissect them out themselves, not that they don't have to know them...right? Please say that's right lol
Yes we still have to know them! Lol, it's definitely a condensed version of what's clinically relevant but it's all done during prosection and not something we have to dissect ourselves.
 
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