Ran into a first year today who mentioned having read my blog when he was applying (yeah, the same one mentioned earlier in this blog) and it got me thinking about why I started writing this blog. It's obviously great to have a positive Internet presence especially when you have a common name like mine but that's not why I started writing.

When I applied to vet school, I found it really important to read firsthand accounts of student experiences at the schools I was applying to. I knew students (past or current) at UF, Ross, SGU, Auburn, LSU... For those I didn't know, there were blogs from students. I was pretty disappointed to find only one blog from a WesternU student and whenever I tried to reach out to her, I didn't get an answer. Her blog was still informative, but I wanted to do something more and be available for students that had questions -- pretty much why I'm still so active on SDN (plus it's good procrastination material and I find myself asking the upperclassmen or graduates questions).

As far as how school is going? Well, I survived exams! I heard small animal exams had a high of 71, large animal had a high of 69 and as for miscellaneous block? Well, I don't have any grades yet. No time to dwell on it though! Small animal block has a ridiculous amount of work and very long hours, so it's onward and upward.

I'm rotating at a small animal hospital south of me. It's about 30 miles away and took me an hour yesterday and an hour and a half today... Needless to say, I'm not loving the commute! The hospital is great though. Tons of doctors to learn from and tons of cases. I've seen DKA, respiratory arrest, incision complications, wellness visits, some ortho problems... It's been great! I've gotten to work on venipuncture, general restraint, clinical reasoning (of course), I got to run coags for the first time on an Abaxis machine as opposed to sending them out, I got to calculate how much plasma to give and what rate as well as set up the plasma! I also did my first small animal euthanasia today which was pretty sad. It's definitely a different feeling pushing Euthasol as compared to putting some mice in a CO2 chamber.

Our school has a pretty anti-social media policy and we actually have a section of our third year handbook that says not to post about cases on social media so I'm trying to be really careful and vague about what I see so I don't run into any trouble!