How are you using your prereqs?

[disabled&proud]

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Howdy current vet students and recent DVMs (past 10 years), this is a question about how your prereqs were used in vet school and beyond. I'm a non-trad vet school hopeful with a PhD in how humans learn, so my question is very pointedly to help me choose how to optimize my review of content after I take classes, beyond covering laws/theories/conceptual level knowledge.

What skills from gen chem, o chem, biochem, and bio classes are you using? Obviously things like microscopy, but do you ever need to balance chemical equations? Predict bond types? Use the gas laws to calculate things like pressure, etc (this one seems likely to me but I haven't been where you have, so what do I know)? Etc. These are all skills that (when looking at assessment research), people can kind of fake their way through and get A's on exams and then if they don't keep using, they have a really hard time transferring to other situations (speaking in general, to my knowledge this research has not been done specifically about veterinary school).

All vet schools seem to expect one basic lower div stats class. Easy peasy, I loved stats in college - except that was a decade ago and my PhD research did not include statistical inference/hypothesis testing because my sample size was too small. So I'm out of practice beyond the very basics (mean, median, percentages, basic probability calculations) that I use when reading and evaluating peer reviewed articles by other people, or for my prereqs (chemistry and physics were not required for any of my prior degrees, so I've been taking those). My stats class taught us to use minitab (anyone else old enough to remember minitab?). Should I learn R? What stats should I actually be able to do going in? (Trying to decide whether it's worth retaking.)

Some vet schools look for precalc, others calc, etc. What maths (other than statistics and the relatively basic arithmetic embedded in dosing/dimensional analysis) are folks using in vet school and clinical practice? Again, I took calculus a decade ago, and really haven't had to use it since. My algebra and trig were good enough to get an A in Physics 1 so I'm not that worried about that, but if there's a practical application of calculus I would like to know what it is, to determine whether I want to retake it.

Physics 1 concepts felt fairly obvious in terms of how they're probably used in a medical context. This was helped by my prof who knew the class had lots of pre-med and pre-vet students in it, so he gave us lots of examples, but if there's anything that stands out I'd love to know your thoughts.

Finally, I would love to know whether folks were in a more traditional lecture/lab program, or in one of the updated programs using a lot of hands on case-based pedagogies (like WSU or U of Arizona, or a ton of other schools rolling these out), so we can maybe collectively see whether the prereqs are being used any differently. (For example, maybe the case-based pedagogies schools are asking students to do something that the lecture based programs never did, or vice versa.)

Thanks in advance!

 

[JaynaAli]

Pre-reqs are about paying your dues and growing up and building foundation upon which to build upon later. You’re not balancing equations on the daily, but that kind of stuff plays into physiology and drug mechanisms and all sorts of things. Most people aren’t going to be thinking down to a molecular level on the daily though, you give Apoquel to the allergic dog because it works and you may be able to say it’s a jak-stat inhibitor, but you don’t usually talk or even think about the exact mechanism. But you do kinda need to understand chem and physiology to really understand how and why it works. The math most people do daily as a vet is basic multiplication/division for drug calculations. But even half of that is done using an excel template nowadays and you just plug the pets weight into the computer and it prints your dosages. Maybe some stiochiometry type stuff is used. I never took a calc class or anything past basic college algebra, which I tested out of during high school. My most useful pre-req classes were ones like genetics and nutrition. I mean you could argue that you don’t need 90% of anatomy to be a vet but you still have to learn it in vet school. For stats specifically, I do think that one is useful because you need to be able to assess papers and understand the stats and determine if they’re actually useful papers you should trust or not.

 

[disabled&proud]

Thank you!

I had a whole class in undergrad on using excel for quantitative decision making. I use that stuff all the time for various life things. Excel dosing templates sound fun.

I read a study that with human medical schools, taking a physiology class as a prereq is not correlated with later success. I can no longer remember what they meant by success (could have been grades, could have been passing the human medicine test, or some combo). But, I enjoyed the class, so I'm not sweating it.

 

[TheDogFather]

I too was a non-traditional student. I took one or two difficult science courses as an undergraduate. Before applying to vet school I took a bunch of physics, chemistry, genetics, statistics, nutrition, and calculus classes. Next to none of it was useful to me in vet school. I did find my human anatomy/physiology course was helpful, not because it was applicable but it prepared me for the way vet school anatomy would be taught and tested. My instructor was also excellent. The statistics classes at least got my feet wet in a subject I never approached. They were pretty elementary but so was the single stats-oriented vet school course. I don't know any general practitioners that sit down and argue P-values, positive predictive numbers, etc. Maybe specialists get into that stuff but by the time the (rare) study that has any relevance to daily practice reaches us, those values have been pretty well filtered out. Most of our nutrition training was large-animal oriented. Our single small-animal nutrition "lab" consisted of looking at labels on food cans and bags. Vet school is not conceptual. You really don't think in abstracts like you might in physics, math, and some chemistry and engineering. It's a tired metaphor but it is truly "drinking from a firehose" fully realizing that you will apply very little of the water. If any undergraduate contemplating vet school asks me, I tell them that, if possible, get at least one sort of anatomy class and as much physiology under their belts as they can. Again, just so you will be ready for the way you will be tested in anatomy and a lot of the way organs and organ systems work in humans and animals are similar, so you will have that much fresh material to memorize. Those tend to be first year courses, so after that it is memorize, regurgitate, and try to ascertain what is worth retaining as you move one.