We just completed our fourth anatomy test this afternoon - an event that is always proceeded by three or four days of early morning and late night studying and very little sleep. It is especially gratifying to be looking back at this one since we now have two weeks without tests (YEAH!) leading into finals week the third week in December (YUCK!).
I have long wondered how someone would willingly chose to be a mortician. It always seemed to me that that line of work would be particularly depressing in that, day in and day out, you are working with people that are dealing with the trauma of having just lost of loved one.
I think that if you were to ask most anyone in vet school why they chose the profession, the most common answer would be “to help animals.” Yet, from what I’ve seen so far, vets have a lot more common with morticians than we’d be willing to admit. So much of what we do, it seems, deals with death and sadness.
It’s kind of hard to believe, but we’re a little more than halfway through the first semester already. I can uncategorically state that I know more than I did two and a half months ago. I can also state that I’ve forgotten more than I knew two and a half months ago. One thing that everyone in my class agrees on is that the information is thrown at us fast and furious. There is little time to breath, and no time to reabsorb information from before the last test. We were told that the really important things will be tossed at us again and again over the course of the next four years, so we shouldn’t stress out over not remembering everything. Personally, I wish they’d just teach us these really important things and give my brain a rest!
One of the great things about a veterinary degree is that you can do all kinds of things with it. Most people associate a veterinarian as the person across town that they take their dog or cat to to get its shots once a year. And, in fact, roughly 85 percent of veterinary graduates end up going into small animal practice. But there are plenty of other opportunities out there for veterinarians that don’t involve ever looking at a dog or cat. Large animal veterinarians can make a living going from farm to farm, or they can specialize in a certain industry such as dairy cattle, swine production, or poultry and work their entire careers for one of the increasingly prevalent livestock production conglomerates.