Vet Student at Košice

I've talked a little about how difficult vet school is, and I'm not the only one who will say that. There is an unbelieveable amount of information that is necessary to know. The best piece of advice I could give a prospective vet students is "yes, you need to know that".  Me and my dad have spent ages learning about learning. Ali Abdaal on YouTube has made a few really helpful videos about studying at med school, although some of his more recent videos aren't so helpful. One of the most amazing tools that we came across is the flashcard app Anki. Honestly life changing. I always tried to make flashcards to revise from before, but I never found them very helpful. Being able to make cards really quickly and easily on my laptop has been a gamechanger. The image occlusion tool and being able to put screenshots in really ups the usefulness.    I've come back to this post from the future - as of 24/10/2022, I've been using Anki solidly for 711 days. It will be ...

I'm sure I only updated this blog last week... I'm now halfway through my second semester of vet school. Officially 1/8th a vet!  It's going well at the moment. We're still completley online at the moment, and it doesn't seem likely that it will change any time soon. I'm a little disappointed, but I'm happy to be in Cornwall. Hopefully we'll be able to at least go to the beach sometime soon. I'm going a little bit stir-crazy! The first few credit tests have started to trickle in - we get a say in when the tests are, and while it can be difficult to coordinate between 40 people, generally the tests are spaced out evenly. I'm glad I kept up with my anki cards over winter break, as I'm generally doing about 500/600 cards a day now. It would have definitely been harder to get back into that if I wasn't already doing them.  Outside of school, I recently had an experience at the vets on the other side - my cat developed a particularly bad UTI, ...

My exams finished a couple of weeks ago, but I've been preparing for the new semester ever since. Unforunately, everything is online again for the foreseeable future. The university is hopeful that the situation will change, and we'll get to do some practicals near the end of term

I've defeated the final bosses of semester 1 of vet school! 8 exams, some very difficult, some a little bit easier, and I'm set to finish with a GPA around 1.2/1.3 (which is good. American's talk about a 4.0 being a perfect GPA, but in Slovakia 1.0 is the best mark you can get). I'm actually retaking my ethics exam tomorrow, because I missed out on an A by one mark. It wasn't too awful the first time so I'm hoping tomorrow I'll do better.  Pretty exciting that I have finished my first semester of vet school. 1/8th of the way to a full vet!

I'm halfway through my winter semester finals at the moment. It's not been as bad as I feared it would be! I got the first 4 done and out of the way in the first 3 days of the exam period. That probably made it a little more stressful than it needed to be, especially coming off the back of 2 weeks of 10 credit tests...  Chemistry is the biggest beast I'm tackling at the moment. And, as it turns out, all of my other subjects are just chemistry with a different hat on. When I sat down this morning to do genetics, I thought, "ah, a lovely break from chemistry", only to open the powerpoint and find it's talking about the synthesis and use of hormones (aka, chemistry). This phenomena is henceforth to be known as Izzy's first law of Veterinary Medicine.   It does feel less like I'm drowning in work now. A bit like when you've just about learnt to crouch on a surfboard and can make it back to shore on a wave, but a big one could still knock you off comple...

I have 10 credit tests over the next 3.5 weeks. Several of them are just little tests about what we've learnt in practicals that I'm not too worried about. The others are tests about the practicals we never got to do which does make things a bit harder. I think the lecturers are very good putting all the necessary informatin into the slides, and have been happy to re-explain any bits that don't quite make sense.  After that, it's Christmas break! Just kidding, it's the winter exam period.  I'm hoping to get at least 1 exam (latin) done before Christmas, and hopefully biophysics too if I can. We have all of January to do all of the exams, which in my case is 7 of them. Exam dates haven't been released yet so I haven't been able to plan a bit of a revision timetable yet. Trying to remind myself to look at individual trees at one time rather than the whole forest all at once...  I feel like I blinked and suddenly I'm nearly halfway through my first year...

I've completed my first week of vet school! How crazy is that! It was just about as I expected it would be - lots of describing how the exams work, how to get credit, reading safety instructions (we've been told in almost every lesson not to put our fingers into electrical sockets, wonder what the story is there). From there, we jumped right into the lectures!  Most of us have applied for exemptions now, too. It was an awful lot of printing out and highlighting, and we have to wait just over a month to hear back. I hope I get at least a partial exemption from a few things, it would be great to have slightly less exam questions. The process was a bit confusing, so maybe I'll write a post about it later. The uni hasn't officially said anything about closing down because of covid, but there are rumours of confirmed cases in the dorms, and the lecturers have mostly elected to do online lectures. Hopefully we still get to do practicals (I learnt how to pick up a mouse and a...

 Today was my first day of vet school. I've never been so excited to go to school before, I was up at 6:30, raring to go. I'd packed my bag and my lunch the night before, so I was out the door bang on 7:30am for my 8:05 lecture. I can't believe I ever complained about 9am lectures before, what a luxury! The building was a bit confusing - there was a huge gate in front of the door, and it was locked so we all milled around outside for a while waiting for someone to let us in. Turns out, we were stood at the wrong door but thankfully someone came around to correct us.  Histology and embryology was really interesting. We started by learning about microscopes and common and special stains for slides, and later in the afternoon we had a practical. The practical was much shorter than usual because we were learning to recognise what stains look like on slides.  Neurons stained with silver Had my first ever Latin lesson today which was a bit rocky, but I think I just need to sit ...

It's getting to the point where almost everything is in place, ready for me to move to an entirely new country!  Because there's currently a pandemic going on in the world, I have to make more considerations in my travel; we have to self isolate for 5 days when we arrive in Kosice, and I believe that currently flights from the UK aren't going directly to Slovakia. A few of us have made a group and will hopefully travelling together, which should make things less stressful!  Secondly, we have to register for a test when we get there, and also register with the proper authorities which is a bit nerve-wracking but it's so cool that I have this opportunity.  I've started packing my suitcase (Rob bought a massive, bright yellow suitcase for when he went to San Jose last year).