Electives at UPenn

[SoundofMusic]

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Hello everyone,

I am currently weighing the electives at UPenn vs. VMRCVM. How have you all liked your elective experience at UPenn. Do you have any favorites? Did anyone have time to take the Wildlife Medicine elective during their first year? I would really like to do this.

Sincerely,
SoundofMusic

 

[GellaBella]

Hello everyone,

I am currently weighing the electives at UPenn vs. VMRCVM. How have you all liked your elective experience at UPenn. Do you have any favorites? Did anyone have time to take the Wildlife Medicine elective during their first year? I would really like to do this.

Sincerely,
SoundofMusic

So far I've found the electives at Penn to be great. Most of the first year class takes Wildlife first year (inlcuding me). It was a really interesting lecture based course on just different wildlife topics. The instructors are great and there is a wetlab on decontaminating animals in oil spills and we had another lab where they brought in wildanimals that had died, we necropsied them and tried to determine cause of death if we could. It was very laid back and pretty interesting change of pace to all our other classes.

Second year I have taken Swine Neonatology (yay piglets! you basically go out to the swine unit and perform castrations on the piglets, give them vaccines and iron injections, ear clip and other aspects of piglet processing) and Swine Husbandry (involved in feeding the sows, doing heat checks, ultrasounding for pregnancy, artificla insemination of the sows etc), Equine Neonatology - spring semester shifts doing pregnancy checks on high risk mares, I saw an emergency C-section of a foal, an emergency c-section on a cow, and was present for the birth of pygmy goats.

So far, every elective I've taken i've enjoyed. Swine Neonatology isn't for everyone - some people don't enjoy the castrations, and I had some reserves about it myself but it's a real world kind of situation and being involved in it is not as bad as it looks from the outside (IMHO).

I don't know about Virginia, but I'm sure they've got great electives as well

 

[bunnity]

This might make sense merged into the other Penn thread...

Wildlife - great class, no stress, labs were super fun.

Global Health - there are 2 versions of this class that alternate by year. I took Dr. Kelly's version and it was very laid back and interesting. I have heard that Dr. Smith's version is more rigorous (Gella did you take that)?

Human Animal Bond - the lectures are very interesting/inspiring. The class is a little disorganized though. You need to do your own independent project but it's really laid back. I took this class twice.

I didn't take the Neonatology or husbandry classes.

I am also getting elective credits from my summer job (working on the curriculum). People who do research get elective credits for that.