Vet Student at Košice

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...

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 the last day before the course starts! I'm very excited to get going. I've been doing a bit of learning to refresh my memory on some things I've half-forgotten since A-levels. Me and two other people went back to Malá farma today. So nice to be around animals for a couple of hours. Apparently there's a cynology module later in the course, and one of the practicals is at Malá farma - if they know you they're more likely to give you a nice dog! Even if that's not true, it's probably not a bad idea to be friendly with as many people as I can. I got to play with the kittens today too. They're so tiny and I could have easily snuck them back in my backpack...  Tiny kittens! They were purring so loudly! Had the weekly family zoom call when I got back - hi nanny and grandpa! Very lovely to see everyone, and I think it's going to be really important to my sanity here to have a bit of regularity.  A quick update on the cases I've made previous blo...