Which Subject was the Hardest for You to Learn in Veterinary Medicine School?

Veterinary Science Graduate Programs from U. of I.
This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
Doctor-S

Doctor-S

Clinical & Research PhD-MD who is feline fine!
Lifetime Donor
Verified Member
Faculty
7+ Year Member
PhD
Rocket Scientist
Verified Expert
Gold Donor
Joined
Jun 9, 2016
Messages
2,603
Reaction score
6,818
I realize the answer to this question will probably depend on your school, and on your individual strengths-and-interests ... but I'm still curious.

Some students have stellar memories and can memorize everything, from start to finish (e.g., anatomy, microbiology).

Other students are much better with concepts, analysis, application, etc. Anyway, you get the idea.

Which subject was the most challenging for you to comprehend (study and learn) in veterinary medicine school? Why?
Members don't see this ad.
 
I struggled most in anatomy and physiology. Both were first year, first semester courses at my school, which didn’t help since they are hard, big classes just as you’re adjusting to vet school. I struggled in anatomy just because of the sheer volume of material to learn, many new terminology terms to learn, and the specificity required for correct answers. I feel like my struggles in physiology were because of the sheer amount of material tested upon and specificity required there too, but my learning style didn’t mesh well with the professors lecture style (among other things) so I had a hard time learning from him.
 
Anatomy. Ours is a 24 week course, divided into our 8 week quarters. Legs the first 8 weeks. Thoracic and abdominal cavity the 3rd 8 weeks. And the head and urogenital system the 4th 8 weeks. I do not memorize well and that's pretty much what it came down to. Anatomy is the class that resulted in me repeating my first year, no doubt. And, tbh, I simply did better in the other courses in order to pass the second time around. I did not do better in anatomy the second time around.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
Imaging. I’m not a visual learner at all and it took me the better part of a semester to figure out how best to study for that course. I ended up having to write out descriptions of what various things looked like and studied off that instead of off pictures. We have normal radiographic anatomy integrated into Anatomy I and II, and then diseases and abnormalities are covered in Imaging I and II. I don’t think I’ve ever worked that hard in a course in my life.
 
Food animal medicine and surgery, because I had/have zero interest in the subject
 
that redhead said:
Neuro. I still struggle with it! Why? Gosh I wish I knew. It seems straight forward but it’s complex! Soo many details and applications.
Click to expand...
Undoubtedly not the same but I took undergrad A&P and neuro was my most difficult section. My professor (who I loved) taught a neurobiology course a year later so I thought “hmm, do more of the things that are difficult and it’ll get easier”. Nope. Neuro is still a cluster**** to me and I dread covering it later this semester in vet school. I have mad respect for neurologists though!!
 
I didn’t particularly love neuro in my pre-clinical years and we didn’t really have a clinics rotation, but I learned a lot about neuro and really came to like it when things were more hands the three months I was on the neuro service my internship year.
 
Applications & Integrations. I am absolutely terrible at on-the-fly oral examinations and it showed. Also challenging for an introvert like me to break the cycle to interrupt some of the extroverts (totes my own fault, and while we tried the whole round robin thing, I do not operate well when ten people suddenly stare at me for an answer because I am an anxious mess :dead: )
 
Members don't see this ad :)
Pharm.

Way too many drugs just tossed at me to magically remember what they all do and how they do it and when they get used and... ugh. I got through it, but it was hard and the long term retention of all that information definitely wasn't there.

I'm still bad at drugs tbh. I basically always look them up. I figure eventually I'll remember the ones I use on a regular basis but until then... I'll be over here looking up every drug I use, thanks.
 
So far neuro has been the hardest and anatomy up there too. Neuro was so foreign and compacted into a single semester (apparently it used to be a fast-track course that was done in like 6 or 8 weeks) but it really needed two semesters.

Anatomy was hard because it was just difficult to predict what they would ask about. So many of the bolded terms seemed completely not clinically relevant yet would still get brought up.

Physiology, I bombed one test and that was enough to wake me up and be like k you gotta do better next time. Ended up being my best subject.
 
Minnerbelle said:
Therio. I literally could give two ****s what the estrus cycle, gestation, parturition, shape/size of genitalia, and jizz volume of each species was like. But soooo much memorization of very similar things that made it really hard to keep straight.
Click to expand...

We had an entire exam question where we basically had to look at a graph of the normal hormone changes of an elephant and write out what an elephant estrus cycle would look like based on the hormonal spikes/changes.

It was essay based question with follow up short answer questions. That one question was more like 8 questions rolled into one, with them all being short answer/essay response.
 
SARdoghandler said:
Anatomy, closely followed by physiology. I really struggle with rote memorization and having aphantasia lead to a whole lot of strugglebus in anatomy specifically
Click to expand...
This is fascinating - and (only) if you feel comfortable sharing more info ... do you recall your dreams?

For instance, do you recall forming "visual images" or pictures in your mind when you're asleep?
 
DVMDream said:
We had an entire exam question where we basically had to look at a graph of the normal hormone changes of an elephant and write out what an elephant estrus cycle would look like based on the hormonal spikes/changes.

It was essay based question with follow up short answer questions. That one question was more like 8 questions rolled into one, with them all being short answer/essay response.
Click to expand...
That’s a great way to test the material in a way that makes sense for the entire class. I would have loved that!
 
Doctor-S said:
This is fascinating - and (only) if you feel comfortable sharing more info ... do you recall your dreams?

For instance, do you recall forming "visual images" or pictures in your mind when you're asleep?
Click to expand...

I have an impression that I form images when I sleep but cannot truly "recall" it. If I'm half awake and still dreaming though, my body assumes whatever I'm seeing is real which leads to some pretty crazy hallucinations in the middle of the night.
 
Minnerbelle said:
That’s a great way to test the material in a way that makes sense for the entire class. I would have loved that!
Click to expand...

Same! If our exams were essay based rather than multiple choice, I think I would have done better in vet school didactics overall.
 
I found anatomy and phys to be some of my easier first year classes; I do well with visual things and things I can puzzle through.

I had a hard time with biochem, even though I did well in it during undergrad. Then also Evidence Based Medicine lol. Study design and analysis is really not my strong suit.
 
SARdoghandler said:
I have an impression that I form images when I sleep but cannot truly "recall" it. If I'm half awake and still dreaming though, my body assumes whatever I'm seeing is real which leads to some pretty crazy hallucinations in the middle of the night.
Click to expand...
This is very interesting - thanks for the additional info! 🙂

Do you feel comfortable drawing pictures of things?

For example, if someone asked you to draw a cow and a horse on a piece of paper, are you comfortable drawing a cow and a horse?
 
Our subjects are markedly different than other schools but even given that I truly hated neurology. It was a combination of complex materials, my studying method, and a professor that was more abrasive than helpful (he wrote a long angry letter at the end of one of our exam keys about how we were all wrong). It's also something I never had exposure to before vet school, so that didn't help.

Therio can also go to hell. I hate therio.
 
Coopah said:
he wrote a long angry letter at the end of one of our exam keys about how we were all wrong
Click to expand...

I've never understood the reasoning behind this. It happened to me in undergrad when 27/28 students got an F on our molecular biology exam, and the other student got a low D. The professor spent the entire next class period going over how we didnt obviously prepare well (Including the valedictorian of our class). Then one of our medicine professors last year did the same when we all got his questions wrong about pancreatitis. How are these vent sessions helpful?!
 
Cell biology. I despised it. All about memorizing things that you won’t remember (or ever need to remember unless you’re going into research). I don’t mind memorizing things that will be useful to me. But memorizing chemical mechanisms or random cell signaling pathways? Heck no. Got a not-so-great grade in that class because I didn’t even have the energy to care about the material.
 
batsenecal said:
I've never understood the reasoning behind this. It happened to me in undergrad when 27/28 students got an F on our molecular biology exam, and the other student got a low D. The professor spent the entire next class period going over how we didnt obviously prepare well (Including the valedictorian of our class). Then one of our medicine professors last year did the same when we all got his questions wrong about pancreatitis. How are these vent sessions helpful?!
Click to expand...
Our was about how a functional endpoint obviously meant a verb???
 
batsenecal said:
Same! If our exams were essay based rather than multiple choice, I think I would have done better in vet school didactics overall.
Click to expand...

Having done both methods of testing-- exam based/verbal/short answer exams and multiple choice exams, there are definitely pros/cons to each.

It is hard to compare which one I did "better" at since the grading systems are so vastly different in the UK and the US, but I can say I felt less overall stress with the frequent, multiple choice US exams than I did with the giant essay based/short answer exams in the UK. However, by the time I was taking US tests I was in third year so I had gotten somewhat adjusted to the stress too.

Let me add in that that elephant estrus question was one of 8 essay questions with each of the 8 essay questions having 10-12 follow us short answer questions and two of the questions required you to plot out graphs. This exam was over material from the entire semester across multiple courses and subject material (this wasn't just an exam on therio), outside of one short quiz that was worth 10% of your grade for all courses/subject material this was the only exam you had to test you on everything taught over the entire semester, if you failed, you failed the course and have to re-take the exam. You only had two hours to take the exam and with 15 minutes remaining of the exam, you were only 50% of the way through so you didn't even finish said exam. That exam gave me some PTSD, I think many of my classmates and I have some serious emotional scars from that exam.

That was how all semesters were in the UK, one exam to cover all material from the semester and topics were all combined together. You didn't get just a therio exam-- you got therio, immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, soft tissue surgery, ophthalmology, think of an ology it was on the exam. There is a different stress level when you only get one chance to show you have mastered the material taught.

Whereas, it seemed to me, the frequent US exams with multiple choice were simpler because it was such a limited amount of material--- here is your one exam on ophthalmology oh and only the stuff that was covered in the two weeks prior to this date. Such a small amount of information. I will say the biggest con to MCQ tests is there is no way to explain your thought process/how you came to an answer which is so beneficial and nice with the essay based short answer question tests.

There is probably some nice middle ground between these two testing methods that really would be best for testing knowledge.
 
DVMDream said:
That was how all semesters were in the UK, one exam to cover all material from the semester and topics were all combined together. You didn't get just a therio exam-- you got therio, immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, orthopedics, soft tissue surgery, ophthalmology, think of an ology it was on the exam. There is a different stress level when you only get one chance to show you have mastered the material taught.
Click to expand...

Illinois has a similar testing schedule/format, though our tests are more frequent. 2 tests/8 week quarter, 1 midterm and 1 final. During 1st year, those exams are worth 50% of your grade, 2nd year they're worth 90% of your grade, then 3rd year they're worth 50-60% again. We test everything at once on each exam because we have megacourses; we only get 1 grade per quarter (so 9 grades total for all the didactics). The midterm, you're responsible for the first 4 weeks of the quarter. Then the final is 60% the 2nd 8 weeks and 30% cumulative for all 8 weeks of the quarter.

Overall, I just dont like multiple choice tests. My undergrad didnt have them in 300+ level courses because our class sizes were, like, 30 max. So they did everything by essay based questions. They've since changed because so many of us alumni have said how unprepared we were to test in professional school. But part of that is also the mindset to. I just never really figured out how to test well with multiple choice tests, or how to effectively study for them with our testing schedule.
 
Parasitology. The sheer volume of material was overwhelming and I found it extremely difficult to memorize all the lifecycles and to remember the geographic distributions, zoonoses, etc.

Neuroscience was a close second though because it was all new material and it required a lot of synthesis. Locating lesions still makes me twitchy, unless it's a really straight forward case.
 
DRider13 said:
Parasitology. The sheer volume of material was overwhelming and I found it extremely difficult to memorize all the lifecycles and to remember the geographic distributions, zoonoses, etc.
Click to expand...
This one is interesting. I took parasit my first year at my original school and really enjoyed it. The content was focused on what was important and most all of the professors were on the young side. Contrast that to my current school—my peers really disliked it. Literally hundreds of slides a week to go through, with every parasite known to man on the slides and no emphasis on what you might actually see in practice, mainly taught by a very tenured professor.

Classes like that really make me grateful that I did my first year elsewhere!
 
DVMDream said:
We had an entire exam question where we basically had to look at a graph of the normal hormone changes of an elephant and write out what an elephant estrus cycle would look like based on the hormonal spikes/changes.

It was essay based question with follow up short answer questions. That one question was more like 8 questions rolled into one, with them all being short answer/essay response.
Click to expand...
This sounds amazing

(I am one of the weirdoes who likes nutrition and therio heh...)
 
jaboo said:
This one is interesting. I took parasit my first year at my original school and really enjoyed it. The content was focused on what was important and most all of the professors were on the young side. Contrast that to my current school—my peers really disliked it. Literally hundreds of slides a week to go through, with every parasite known to man on the slides and no emphasis on what you might actually see in practice, mainly taught by a very tenured professor.

Classes like that really make me grateful that I did my first year elsewhere!
Click to expand...

I actually enjoyed it and learned a lot, but I found it extremely broad with little depth. If I have no sense of what's the "most important" in the course content, then I really struggle to learn the material well.

In all fairness I probably I just need more clinical experience to better appreciate the less common parasites lol.
 
DVMDream said:
There is probably some nice middle ground between these two testing methods that really would be best for testing knowledge.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure it's the absolute best method for testing (probably free response on a more frequent testing interval than they do in the UK), but VMCVM does sort of a combo of the two schools you went to.

We had test every two weeks on every lecture you've had during that time. Mega courses were (mostly) organized by functional body system ("Breathing and Circulating," "Eating and Eliminating," etc). Every hour of lecture = 2 questions per exam. So, a discrete amount of material - usually between 25-45 hours of lecture per exam, but covering all conceivable subjects and in no sort of order.

It was mostly multiple choice, but some instructors included questions where you could click on a picture or had to do something like a fill in the blank to try to make it both easy to grade but a little more interactive than straight MC.
 
I’d say I was the closest to failing physiology because... of the same reason that Jayna explained. The professor and I did not mesh well.

the class I did the worst in that I still don’t remember- large animal anatomy. It was right after lunch and the professor always turned the lights off and it was cozy in there... not gonna lie, I fell asleep easily more times in that class than I was in there. I am not proud of it, but it is what it is.:laugh:
 
supershorty said:
Imaging. I’m not a visual learner at all and it took me the better part of a semester to figure out how best to study for that course. I ended up having to write out descriptions of what various things looked like and studied off that instead of off pictures. We have normal radiographic anatomy integrated into Anatomy I and II, and then diseases and abnormalities are covered in Imaging I and II. I don’t think I’ve ever worked that hard in a course in my life.
Click to expand...
I treated radiology like those magic eye pictures where you have to unfocus your eyes, put your nose against the screen, and back away until something floats out at you. I did insanely well on our tests with this method and can't read actual radiographs for **** lmao. Anyway I'm basically a radiologist
Minnerbelle said:
Therio. I literally could give two ****s what the estrus cycle, gestation, parturition, shape/size of genitalia, and jizz volume of each species was like. But soooo much memorization of very similar things that made it really hard to keep straight.
Click to expand...
The only thing I learned in our therio class is that one of our professors made a DIY ferret electroejaculator for a research project
 
I had a hard time with physiology because it was tedious, boring, and taught by 50 different professors. The cardiology section in particular was the worst.

Our bacteriology class was also hilariously disorganized and I felt like I was having a stroke the entire time we had lecture.

Our epi class in second year sucked because I already had an MPH by that point so being taught for four weeks how to design a basic epi study before we even moved on to 2x2 tables was excruciating.

Oh, and I hated hated haaaated our surgery class. So many suture materials. So many lectures on how to perform specialty referral horse fracture repairs for some reason. So many times where I struggled to suture in front of someone and they basically shrugged and said they didn't know what I was doing wrong either but they were sure if I just tried it more I would magically stop doing all of the things I was doing wrong.

Otherwise most of our classes have been okay to good for me. I'm one of those people who loves tidbits and fun facts to a truly excessive degree so I took really well to a lot of the big offenders already listed on this thread, including anatomy, pharm, parasitology, and neuro.
 
vetmedhead said:
I treated radiology like those magic eye pictures where you have to unfocus your eyes, put your nose against the screen, and back away until something floats out at you. I did insanely well on our tests with this method and can't read actual radiographs for **** lmao. Anyway I'm basically a radiologist
Click to expand...

One of the radiologists where I did my internship told us that he used to just stand really far away from a radiograph or squint his eyes and see what part of the image his eye was drawn to and go from there. So there may be something to your method haha
 
Last edited:
allygator13 said:
One of the radiologists where I did my internship told us that he used to just stand really far away from a radiograph or squint his eyes and see what part of the image his eye was drawn to and go from there. So there may be something to your method haha
Click to expand...
4bldn2.jpg
 
Honest to god. Our small animal surgery/medicine class almost killed me. It was a hodgepodge firehose of medical conditions, surgeries, etc in dogs and cats that made no sense and the tests were just rote memorization of useless facts with no applications whatsoever. Two semesters of hell that I got next to nothing out of. Our radiology class was also a rough time but the rotation was very helpful to me. Thankfully clinics helped it all come together. I really loved parasit, therio, and food animal, though.
 
itsrocky said:
Honest to god. Our small animal surgery/medicine class almost killed me. It was a hodgepodge firehose of medical conditions, surgeries, etc in dogs and cats that made no sense and the tests were just rote memorization of useless facts with no applications whatsoever.
Click to expand...
Omg the never ending test questions about special dynamic plates and in what order and what orientation the special screws had to go in for those plates in what circumstances. Like seriously, perhaps maybe 1 or 2 students in the class will ever need to know that...

How to biopsy various abdominal organs would have been much more helpful. Oh right, that wasn’t taught.

Similarly, instead of obsessing about fracture repair and the art of how to fix this and that fracture type... the art of mass removals and how to close them in different situations would have been much more beneficial.
 
Minnerbelle said:
Omg the never ending test questions about special dynamic plates and in what order and what orientation the special screws had to go in for those plates in what circumstances. Like seriously, perhaps maybe 1 or 2 students in the class will ever need to know that...

How to biopsy various abdominal organs would have been much more helpful. Oh right, that wasn’t taught.

Similarly, instead of obsessing about fracture repair and the art of how to fix this and that fracture type... the art of mass removals and how to close them in different situations would have been much more beneficial.
Click to expand...
ugh yes
 
Minnerbelle said:
Omg the never ending test questions about special dynamic plates and in what order and what orientation the special screws had to go in for those plates in what circumstances. Like seriously, perhaps maybe 1 or 2 students in the class will ever need to know that...

How to biopsy various abdominal organs would have been much more helpful. Oh right, that wasn’t taught.

Similarly, instead of obsessing about fracture repair and the art of how to fix this and that fracture type... the art of mass removals and how to close them in different situations would have been much more beneficial.
Click to expand...

soooo much agree here.
 
At the risk of steering this thread hopelessly off topic, for all the stubborn gaps I can’t close, tie over bandaging is always there for me. Gosh I love em.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

M
  • Locked
Why do you want to pursue a career in veterinary medicine?
Replies
3
Views
318
ThunderMuffin
T
Mr.Smile12
[DVM360 Opinion] Comparison and competition in veterinary medicine
Replies
4
Views
597
pp9
pp9
M
SDN Article: Pursuing a Combined DVM/PhD Program: A Path to Research in Veterinary Medicine
Replies
1
Views
250
supershorty
supershorty
Mr.Smile12
[Discuss] Lyon College School of Veterinary Medicine, coming soon
Replies
26
Views
3K
WhtsThFrequency
WhtsThFrequency
A
LMU Pre-Veterinary Mission Trip!
Replies
0
Views
354
andrea.doty
A
Top