Vet Student at Košice

Vet school is rapidly coming to an end for me, as of writing this, I only have 101 days until I graduate!  2024 started quite early - in January we had two weeks of lectures in the subject "Professional Communication", which was aimed mostly at helping students prepared for their thesis defence, and a little about job interviews. Long time readers will know that I defended my thesis a year early , so the lectures weren't super useful to me. They were spaced out enough that I was able to go home for a few days which was nice, because there wasn't time during the horse block! Onto that - in order of difficulty, I would rank the states from hardest to "easiest" as smalls, horses, ruminants and lastly pigs. In terms of hours, the horses schedule is probably the most intense, with 2 weeks of clinic hours and 3 weeks of lectures, leaving 2 weeks of free time to study. The lectures were mostly interesting, although we did have a few repeats and one of our professor...

The last 7 weeks have been ... insane.  I started my last year with diseases of pigs, which was a very relaxed way to begin - one might say too relaxing.  Going from a very slow study schedule, only having 50 questions to learn, to having 166 was a bit intense. The schedule for the smalls rotation was much busier too - we had 11 days in the clinic, including a night shift (which thankfully for me was very chill), and you could sort of study but it was the first time we'd seen each other for a few weeks so we did spend a lot of time chatting. I've had the privilege of seeing quite a lot of surgery at my previous job and at my clinical placements, so when the opportunity arose to assist in surgeries, I let my colleagues with less experience take part. The surgery suite at the small animal clinic is actually fantastic, they refurbished fairly recently, and it's incredibly high tech. The only bit I disliked about the clinic was how the animals are treated - not badly necessaril...

I had my first state exam today - Contagious Diseases. When I tell you I was dreading this, that does not even cover it.  I studied so much for this exam. I don't particularly like thinking about contagious diseases, as I'm a bit of a hypochondriac. I was doing minimum 6 hours a day reading, doing ankis, watching videos, talking about the diseases. Any possible way to study for this exam, I was doing it.  There are 39 questions about various bacterial, viral and parasitic diseases. Most of the questions are ok, diseases that I know about and don't mind. But there were a few questions that I really, really, really did not want. In particular the question about hemorrhagic fevers. Guess which question I pulled?  To make things worse, the professor on the panel studies hemorrhagic fevers, and is a bit of an expert in the area. I couldn't remember the big disease of veterinary importance (Rift Valley Fever), and could only remember some stuff about ebola and hanta fever. I...