One of my classmates pointed out, quite correctly, that nobody should be failing out in the third year. The ranks should have been thinned in the first year, not this late in the game when people have accrued significant debt and invested years of their life. There is no consolation prize, no interim degree that we can be given then sent on our way. We did in fact lose four or five in the first year and more in the second year. And here we are, in the third year, still losing far too many people.
Failing in vet school is defined as getting a grade of D or worse. What happens to someone who fails a course in vet school? They begin the process of remediation. I don't really understand remediation. My friend M says our ignorance is a good sign. There are lots of "if this, then that" qualifiers, but sometimes people can take another exam; if they pass, they will be allowed to continue. Sometimes people are not allowed to advance and have to wait for an entire year to repeat one or more classes. If that happens, their graduation is delayed by a year. This happened to a woman from the class ahead of us. She just appeared in our Large Animal Medicine lecture this term. She failed it last year and had to repeat only that course. I suspect that she is one of the five I mentioned above. If she failed it a second time, what happens? Honestly, I don't know.
It was a difficult term for me too. I felt like I was on the wrong foot for the entire term. Some good things happened, like the publication of our laying hen ovary paper on the Monday of finals week. Some very bad things related to the still-unresolved issue of the predator happened too. I felt like I spent nearly all my free time doing nothing but studying. But I barely passed Large Animal Medicine myself. That is not like me.
I also found out towards the end of the term that one of the surgery instructors made every single female student cry during surgery. I thought it was just me. I was struck nearly speechless when I found out that he treated all of us that way. Only the women students, not the men. Yeah, that's a problem. I don't go to school with precious snowflakes. My female classmates kick some serious ass. But he was so cruel to all of us that he made us cry. That was just one more burden added to this already overwhelming term.
I had grand plans for the break. With the successful publication of our first manuscript, I wanted to get the draft of the next one ready for my co-authors. Such grand plans. About all that I managed to do was re-take all of the photomicrographs so that I have high resolution images for the next paper. I have 66 histology slides and ended up with a couple of hundred images. They are very nice, to be sure. But I only have the barest outline of text to go with them and dozens of new references to read. That's not likely to be advanced much in the next couple of weeks.
I'm going to view this dismal term as a wake-up call. I need to change my study methods for some of my courses. I need to get more exercise. I'm still in the game.
I'll leave you with this picture of a pre-cancerous lesion associated with chronic inflammation in the surface epithelium of the ovary of a laying hen. I haven't white-balanced the image yet--I do that by hand in Photoshop. Still, it is impressive. I'm describing this lesion as "exuberant epithelium."
