A word of advice I wish I was given!
As many of you know, I am in my final year of vet school. Our final year is comprised of 48weeks of placement, in a huge variety of veterinary fields. So far I have completed 10weeks of my placement, it’s exciting, but daunting! And many times I think to myself.. am I ready?! How the hell did I get this far! Yes, I still have 4/5ths of the year left, but I can’t help but think – what the hell have I been doing in the last 4 years of vet school!
We constantly get asked questions through our rotations. I feel like half the time I’m trying to scrape my brain for something…ANYTHING! Are they asking these types of questions because they know we fell asleep during that boring as pharmacology lecture during 3rd year? I hope so… I know I’m not the only one, and we get told a lot ‘ you’re not expected to know everything’. But sometimes I wish I could go back to when I was a first year, and have someone tell me what I’m about to tell you.
Don’t go through vet school just trying to get through exams!
And yes! This is what I, and many others, spent our time doing! Vet school is difficult! It is so easy to fall into the trap of ‘I’ll just learn the practice/past exam questions’. To be fair, it is not entirely our, the students, fault. The amount of content we are expected to learn is phenomenal! Unless you are extremely gifted and can read something once and remember it for the rest of your life (I envy you)… you will run out of time to try and learn everything you are taught.
I wish I could go back and tell myself to learn the basics, the reason you get those pathological lesions in the liver. Not just learn lists, which were required for exams. Because, if you are like me, thousands of lists don’t stay in your memory for very long! Think broad! Try and relate things you learn together. Don’t just rote learn the steps of wound healing, understand them, understand how each step relates to the process. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you get to 5th year! Another tip – don’t ignore the content that only comprises 5% of the semesters marks, because i guarantee that you will need to know it at some point or another, and it really sucks when you don’t even know what the heck the vet is talking about!
I am, however, very thankful that the vets are asking these difficult questions. Almost like they know what it was like, to boycott that series of lectures because the lecturer guaranteed the exam questions would be the same as last years, and not remember a thing about them. At least I know the answers to those questions now!
Now, please excuse me whilst I go bury myself in textbooks and engorge on ice cream!
Disclaimer: vet school is also extremely fun and the best years of your life! And also, rotations are exciting! I got to scrub into a spinal cord decompression surgery today! Super awesome!!!
Surfing Vet - Jess Roberts 