I have now taken two of my 8 exams in 4 weeks--Clin path exam 2 and Virology exam 1. In 3 more weeks, I'll be done with the hard part of the semester...it's not that long except that I also have 6 tests to go before then. I'm really looking forward to PBL after Thanksgiving.
Clin path was...not as great as last time. We still haven't gotten our grades back (even though they were supposed to be in our boxes Friday morning at the latest...) so I don't know exactly how bad it was, but the instructor sent out an email indicating that he was disappointed we didn't do as well as on the first exam. Virology, on the other hand--for all our stressing out about it--wasn't too bad. It was LONG (75 questions, most of which were 4-5 lines long not counting the answer choices) and a very complete assessment, but I thought it was very fair. There were only a couple of questions I straight up did not study, and nothing I was wondering "Where did this come from?" I'm really glad I went to his review session on Thursday; there were We just took that yesterday, but apparently he's already got the grades back because he sent out the distribution curve. It looked pretty reasonable to me--there were a good number of A's, and I think I'm one of them.
I did take time out of my studying Tuesday to go vote! Pretty much the entire evening out of my studying, tbh. I didn't realize the election was this week until the day before it happened, and I'm registered where my parents live, not in Baton Rouge. So I drove the hour there and back to vote, and got to have dinner with my mom and brother while I was there. Totally worth it, especially since I did get the dinner. Voting is Important.
Next week we only have one exam, but it's our cumulative final in Pharmacology. At least we'll actually have two hours for it this time...but it's also basically two tests in one, since we've covered a whole test's worth of new stuff. It's really quite intimidating. But I've done well in the class so far, and I just ran a grade calculator--if I get at least a decent B on this, I can keep my A. The exam got moved to Thursday, too--which is mildly inconvenient for the Pathology club wetlab we have planned for Wednesday, but really good for giving us more time to study. I'm planning to try and get on top of Systemic path this week, too, since that exam is next week and it's a ton of material.
So, um. You know how I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this November? Well, apparently I can't let November go by without taking a challenge. There's a thing on tumblr called the Book Photo Challenge where tumblr user books-cupcakes puts up a list of prompts for each day of the month, and you put up a photo for each day. So I am actually doing that. My favorite picture is still the first one I took:
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| For November 1--Currently Reading; I actually finished it that day! |
Speaking of horses...I am going to be riding in a jumping clinic tomorrow, like I mentioned last week. Only now I've ridden Isabella. She's...a challenge, that's a nice way to put it. I don't know what's wrong with me that I can't manage to have a good second course, but this one was BAD. We got around the whole course the first time (though she tried to run out at the first jump), and not badly either. But the second course was just a little more complicated, and Isabella refused a jump. And then went on to refuse about a dozen more jumps, including a crossrail. My instructor said it was because she was tired and didn't want to work (she had been ridden in the previous lesson, and schooled earlier), but that still didn't make me feel great about my riding. It's not very fun to spend half the lesson failing to get your horse over a single jump. Despite how blatantly terrible I was on Isabella, my instructor still wants me to ride her in the clinic. And I will, of course, but I don't think it will be as much fun as my ride last week. I wish I could have done the clinic on her instead. It's probably a good thing that I'll have to work with Isabella again--but I would prefer to do the clinic on a horse I actually work well with. I did at least trot a whole lap without stirrups, so that's something. Alea said next week we'll be starting No-Stirrups November, so that's apparently a thing.
I am really proud of myself regarding running, though! Last Friday I went running after school, and actually used the workout app I recently learned my iPod has so I could track my miles and my time. I had a good bit to run away from, between the Parasitology exams (no, I still don't know how I did) and Halloween stuff, and I actually ran the whole 4 miles! Actually, according to the app, it was 4.9 miles, but I don't know how much to trust that. And I was really proud of that, especially at an 8:09 mile, but I didn't really think that meant I could regularly run 4 miles...until this morning! I don't have my time because my iPod died halfway through (pretty near literally halfway, I think, now that I know the distance more concretely per the app), but I did definitely run the whole loop, and that's definitely 4 miles.
On Wednesday we had our first and only DIC wetlab of the semester, on ultrasound. It was the first successful wetlab since I've been an officer, but this time actually a good number of people came! We had two stations to practice ultrasound on live dogs, and one station with a cadaver dog so we could practice ultrasound-guided aspirates and biopsies. I took a bunch of pictures as Historian (but they're not on the computer yet and I'm not sure I'd want to put them up here anyway) and also got to do the things myself. It was the first time I looked at an ultrasound of the liver and recognized it as liver. I was only okay at finding things, but I'm getting a lot better at knowing what I'm looking at, and I feel like that's half the battle with ultrasound. I'm really glad I got a chance to do that, and I'm glad it was (for once!) successful.
Last night we had a VBMA dinner meeting where a vet from Texas came to talk to us about professionalism and also practice management. About half the time was him answering questions, and he kept asking for more questions and even picking out a random person in the audience and asking them to come up with a question (which I'm not really cool with). He made some interesting points, especially about "live to work" vs "work to live." According to one study he cited, people in large animal or mixed animal medicine are mostly "live to work," and "work to live" people can only be happy in small animal medicine. If that's the case, there is less a shortage of large animal vets and more a shortage of vets who would be happy in that career. It was a pretty interesting presentation, and I'm really glad I went. I went up and talked to him afterwards (especially after he said how he wanted to greet everyone as they came in) and gave him my card. I asked him to email me stuff about marketing, since he mentioned that he'd had some great success with that. I really like this idea for future networking--if I'm giving my card to somebody and I actually care (I give out a lot of business cards just because I can, and I've got 250 of them and they'll all be obsolete in 3 years), to ask them to email me about something specific. I'm still not sure whether I really care about networking with this particular vet, but he was really engaging--in that I personally asked a lot of questions, which I don't normally do. So, you know. I roll with it.
Well, I've effectively spent all morning not-studying. I'm going to grab some lunch and then get to work on this Pharm thing. Only 3 more weeks of exams!
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