Diary of a First-Year Vet Student: Take A Deep Breath

This morning, my alarm didn't go off.

It wasn't a failure of technology nor was it human error. It didn't go off because I didn't set an alarm for this morning.

For the past several weeks, my alarm has been going off at 4am every single day, including weekends. During the week, in between feeding dogs, playing with dogs, eating breakfast, and showering, I can get in a solid two to three hours of study before I have to be in class. I would come home from class every day, play with dogs, feed dogs, play with dogs again, and put in three to four hours more study before feeding myself and falling into bed. Only for the alarm to go off at 4am the next morning. Weekends I could stuff in around 8 hours of study a day.

Vet school. Kicking the asses of first-year students everywhere.

However, my final grades are in and I am pleased. Early on, I saw the incredible flood of information that I was being asked to organize and stuff into my brain (beating one's head over and over with a handful of notes doesn't work, I'm here to report), saw that it was not going to abate at all, and I made a big decision. I decided that my goal was going to be to score "above average" on everything. This is not some twisted "Prairie Home Companion" nonsense (I hate that sad attempt at entertainment anyway). It was clear that the amount of time I would have to put into studying in order to earn top scores in every class was far beyond what I was willing to commit.

See, I like having a life. What I described above may not sound like much of a life, but I think that having time for my dogs is important. And when I say "feed myself," I mean cook meals with real food using utensils and spices, and that also implies getting fresh food at the store on a regular basis. I like having a glass of wine with my dinner. I like taking naps on the weekends. I like having time to attend cool labs and learning events in the evenings (I did a lecture and web lab on cow hoof trimming; we worked with cow cadaver legs bolted with large U-bolts and wing nuts to a wooden platform set on sawhorses, an arrangement that was just as fascinating to ponder as learning how to clean and trim their hooves). I like having time to help Jean with bleeding her calves on the weekends. I also decided that I would take one night a week off. It was a different night every week because of the exam schedule, but I did manage this for about half of the term. I also tried to consume some international news every other day or so, even if it was reading one article in depth or just scanning headlines. I like to live in a clean house (relative, since I live with animals, but I do not like squalor). I made sure that I maintained a regular sleep-wake schedule, even if it was not quite enough sleep most of the time.

Getting into vet school requires that you out-compete a lot of people. But once you get here, the notion of competition seems sort of silly. It's not a zero-sum game--she gets an A so I can't. And I'm grouped in with 55 very smart people. I simply refuse to do nothing at all except study.

We each have a locker in our classroom (we are in the same room for every class except anatomy lab, which is in an adjoining room). When some of my peers open their locker, a cartoonish waterfall of ramen noodle cups, candy bars, and bags of snacks cascades out--they eat nearly every meal every day in that windowless room. Some of my peers also seem to have eschewed showering for weeks at a time, deciding that the half hour or so it would take to shower and wash their hair on a semi-regular basis simply couldn't be carved out of their study schedule. These young people have not learned how to balance life and work. They stepped straight from undergraduate life into an environment for which most were not very prepared. We had tears and meltdowns of various sorts throughout the term, particularly before and after exams. Since we had bit exams every week for the last five weeks of the term, not including final exams, there were plenty of tears.

However, as I suspected and confirmed a couple of days ago, their study schedule is not as rigorous as it might seem. They spend more than half of their "study time" looking at youtube videos of cats and sharing links to podcasts of readings of Harry Potter fan-fic porn (don't ask; rule 34).

Anyway, I digress. My goal, to score above average, is simple. One point above the class average still counts--it's above the average. And it is in fact a functional goal that can help me gauge my progress. I was stunned as I walked out of the second gross anatomy midterm exam a few weeks back, convinced that I had failed it. I did in fact fail the lab part but managed to keep myself in the game with a good score on the written part (the written questions are based on clinical applications of knowledge of anatomy: if your dog presents with this kind of injury, I can tell you which muscles, nerves, and arteries would be affected, but ask me to identify those on a cadaver and I fail more than half of the time). My disappointing score spurred me to radically change my study program for the final exam, and I pulled out a much better score on the lab part of the final and an even better score on the written part of the final, an exam that included about 25% of the older material. Instead of lowering expectations for my performance on any quiz or exam, my goal was actually freeing. I was able to organize my study time while still making time for life outside vet school, and succeed on my own terms.

I won't be the vet that makes all Cs in vet school and still gets the diploma in the end. I will be better than that. And so far, it seems to be working. My GPA in vet school will be less than a perfect 4.0, but I have a life outside being a student that keeps me steady and sane. I suspect that I will be more successful in the long run than if my goal was to make the highest scores.