The start of summer

Okay, so summer officially started about 3 weeks ago... anyway. Despite my attempts to keep this blog updated I have obviously been neglecting it; I will be doing my utmost to work on that this summer.

To recap: Finals came and went with a blur. Here at Iowa State's CVM we have finals at 8am-12pm and 1pm-5pm Monday through Thursday; Friday is when the graduating class has their senior banquet (graduation is Saturday) and the new VM4s enter clinics. In any case, we had a whopping 7 finals in 4 days, not including electives, scheduled for this semester. I'll go through each class separately because I feel like rambling a bit.

VDPAM 312, Vet in Society II aka Animal Welfare. The final was scheduled for Wednesday at 1pm, but we were given the option to do a final project in lieu of the final. It had to be approved sometime in March and was due April 23rd (i.e. Friday before dead week). So, I was done with the class before the last class.

BMS 331, Anatomy. The laboratory portion of our final was finished the Friday of dead week, which made Wednesday's 8am lecture final seem sooo much more bearable. I say "seem" because it was nothing like the old exams and covered a lot of random factoids. On the plus side--no more anatomy!

BMS 346, Case Study II. Yeah. I definitely under-prepared for this exam (which was our first final) as the rest of them seemed much more important.

BMS 334, Histology. We had our histo final Monday afternoon. There were a total of 6 (I think) sections, one from each of the instructors, and was entirely multiple choice. Though if any future Iowa Staters are reading this--the professor you will have for nutrition and GI phys can make a multiple choice exam anything but a multiple choice exam. Seriously; each set of questions were basically "here are 5 statements (a-e) and one of them is false. Eliminate the false one and put the rest in order for #s 1-4." I'll also warn you that his non-final exams are not multiple choice.

BMS 380, Immunology. Our immuno final was Tuesday morning. It was identical in format to every other test in the class, but it would have been awesome not to take it Tuesday morning** (see below).

VPth 342, General Pathology. The path final was Tuesday afternoon. It took me like 3.5 hours (part of this was waiting to view specimens).

BMS 337, Neurobiology. Our last final was neuro. It was by far the one I was most worried about; I kind of dropped the ball a bit on the midterm (several concepts were flipped in my head) so I spent a ton of time studying for the final. As with the midterm there was a lecture and a lab portion. I took the lab portion first, and was feeling fairly confident about my knowledge up until the moment I looked at the lecture exam. Moral of the story--don't underestimate neuro.

**we can actually vote to change our exam schedules. Though for some reason the 'vast majority' of my class voted not to change the finals schedule. I am at a loss as to why.

In summary, I got a whopping 16 hours of sleep between Sunday and Thursday. This was not planned but was fear-driven. Overall my grades were decent (though my GPA did take a bit of a nosedive) and I survived my first year of veterinary school. Amidst the craziness of finals I also managed to apply to the Wildlife Care Clinic internship here at ISU.

After finals I took care of a few things, packed up some stuff and my cat, and hightailed it back home. My mother and I left Friday morning, picked up my sisters and my younger sister's boyfriend 3 hours later, and we embarked for a week (mostly) without internet access to visit family on the east coast. We returned, I was notified that I got the WCC internship (I'll talk about this in my next post), and I returned to Ames.

My dog has also rejoined me as of Saturday and seems to be adjusting better this time around. In these past few days he has learned not to barrel down my front steps (he now waits patiently for me to close the door and walks down them nicely) and to stand quietly while I pick up his poop. He and the cat are getting along swimmingly, as well.

To wrap up this monster of a post, between my internship and my other job I'm very much tied to Ames this summer.