Diary of a Second-Year Vet Student: The -ologies

To continue to receive AVMA accreditation, vet schools tend to adhere to the same curriculum. Schools that have adopted a "case-based" curriculum, such as Cornell, might deviate somewhat from the traditional schedule, but for the most part, vet students use the same textbooks and take the same classes in the same sequence no matter what school we are attending.

First term of the second year can best be described as the "-ology" term: systemic pathology, bacteriology, virology, parasitology, and pharmacology. 

All except pharmacology have associated labs that involve the usual seeing, touching, and doing. We have to don way more PPE than we did in any of the first-year labs (PPE is the acronym for "personal protective equipment"; I used PPE while contributing to a group presentation and was surprised to find quite a few of my classmates didn't know what it meant; oy, they can't experience the real world soon enough...). Our lab PPE includes the usual requirement for close-toed shoes, long lab coats, gloves, eye protection (glasses don't count; have to have another layer over them), and sometimes face masks. We also have additional protocols such as washing hands before putting on gloves, washing hands after taking off gloves, and wiping down all lab bench surfaces with bleach before and after every lab. All of this is standard BSL-2 (biosafety level 2) protocol. These actions are good habits to acquire--far too many of the "illustration" images used for vet med presentations are of people handling diseased animals with no precaution or protection at all.

I think most of my classmates, after seeing slide after slide of disgusting infections with arcing pus fountains and candid photos of parasites (did you know there is an entire family of gut worms that have LIPS? This is the stuff of nightmares, I assure you), are now washing their hands rather compulsively all day. I certainly am.