Diary of a Second-Year Vet Student: Readin' and Writin'

I developed a rather painful swelling in the knuckle of my left index finger (between the proximal phalange of digit 2 and metacarpal 2, to be precise) from all the manual writing I had been doing during the first year of vet school.

This might be a good point to admit that, yes, I am left-handed. Based on an informal poll, about one-third of my classmates are left-handed. Since we lefties only comprise about 10% of the general population, there is some weird selection going on that brings more of us into vet school.

But back to my story. In that first year of vet school, I blew through hundreds of pages of paper and index cards making lecture notes then summaries of notes (what I call meta-notes). I took to wearing a neoprene compression wrap while at home. However, the swelling and pain in my joint did not resolve over the summer, so I've gradually transitioned away from writing to working almost exclusively with my class notes in digital form. 

It's a new way of studying for me. Writing things out is an effective way to cement concepts. You build muscle memory at the same time you form connections between things. While I can certainly type almost as fast as someone speaks, and I can type far faster than I can write, it is a different way of organizing information. 

I still resort to pencil and paper when I need to make diagrams or need to flesh out steps in a calculation for drug dosing. And of course I print out all those fancy outlines when I've finished with them, and they get plenty of hand-written annotations in the margins as I find new connections between things. I haven't abandoned my precious mechanical pencils.

One big advantage of digital notes is that I can include photographs of gnarly (animal) body parts in my digital notes. It's becoming clear that this will be extremely useful. We are taking our first class on radiography (x-rays) and radiographic interpretation. There is no way I could capture that information by writing or drawing it by hand.

Another advantage of typing everything is that it just takes fewer hours to summarize lectures than it does to write it out. It's so much easier to keep up, and even get a little bit ahead, of the assigned work. 

Vet school is hard enough on its own. Serendipitous discoveries of extra hours in the day are more than welcome.