vet2be.com

You can’t. The end.

This past summer I received an e-mail from a vet student here at the University of Minnesota (simply referred to as “The U” by everyone in Minnesota) announcing that students were welcome to attend the American Association of Bovine Practitioners (AABP) conference in Vancouver in September. I like cows and Vancouver sounded nice, so I responded saying I was interested. The next e-mail I got from this student informed me that plane tickets had been purchased for all of those who expressed interest in going and would I please send in $300 as a deposit. And so, even though in my mind I was “still thinking about it,” I suddenly found myself faced with the fact that I would be attending a conference - and therefore missing two days of classes - only three weeks into my veterinary school career.

I hemmed and hawed and seriously considered backing out, even if it meant having to pony up the $300 without getting anything for it. But in the end I decided to just go with the flow and see how things turned out.

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My first time around in college, at Indiana University, many moons ago, I had zero disposable income and as such meals anywhere but at the residence hall cafeteria were rare treats. There was no cafeteria service on Sunday afternoons, so we were forced to subsist on a diet of macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles, or other assorted cheap, yet easy-to-prepare convenience foods. I remember one weekend I prepared a concoction of instant mash potatoes mixed with a chicken bullion cube in an attempt to give the meal some flavor. It turned out to be so horrible that I ended up flicking most of it on to the wall in the hallway of our dorm (it seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time) where it hardened and stuck with such force that it could not be pried off of the wall. For the rest of the year it served as a reminder of my culinary shortcomings every time I walked out of my room, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is still there.

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Up until today, week 2 of vet school was feeling a lot like week 1 - i.e. fun. Yesterday afternoon we had a lab on giving dairy cows physicals, including a rectal, which is always interesting but not much fun for the cow. The class of 90 was broken into two groups, an early group and a late group, and I was in the late group. By the time it came for me to perform a rectal exam, they had run out of lube and the poor cows were “over-used,” so I skipped that part. That’s okay because I’d done it before, both in a previous class and as part of artificial insemination training I took a couple of years ago.

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Well, we’re three days into vet school, and so far it is pretty much a blast. The first two days we concentrated on horses - behavior, anatomy, safety. Today we worked with dairy cows. Sure, we’ve had a bit of physiological chemistry thrown in for good measure, but even that seems reasonable because, unlike our undergrad biochem courses, everything we are learning is geared towards the animal species we are going to be working with rather than bacteria or humans.

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Last Tuesday, at long last, the journey began. The university threw a “welcome” barbecue for the 90 students that make up the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine class of 2011. When I was applying, 90 seemed like a pretty small number when compared to the 1000 people I was competing with. When you’re thrown into a room with 90 people you’ve never met before, it seems like an awful lot of people to try to get to know, much less remember their names. Fortunately, name tags where the order of the evening.

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