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...

 Turns out I'm not the best at keeping a blog!  It's been a bit of a whirlwind the last few weeks. The university has shut down for the time-being due to covid-19, most likely until next semester. All our lectures and practicals are online now (the practicals have mostly been replaced with videos or small weekly tests.  Rob and I have come back down to Cornwall, and moved out of our house in Surrey. Hopefully that's the last big change for a while, because it has been fairly disruptive to my studying. One less thing to worry about though. It's lovely in the barn with the log burner and a cat to keep us company. I've been learning a lot, and learning a lot about learning. There are a few methods that I've found to be very helpful (active recall questions and Anki flashcards to start with). I think the effort I put into learning about learning is paying off - I've got pretty good grades in nearly all my tests so far!  Some subjects are much harder than others,...

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...