I survived!

Goodbyyyeee first year!

It feels crazy to write that, especially since I remember writing my first blog post when I moved here in September, and that does notttt feel like 8 months ago!

Since my last post we wrote another 6 exams, the dreaded genetics one wasn't as bad as I was expecting. Goodbye forever genetics! It's always been one of my least favourite classes and I took way too many of them in undergrad. On Monday we wrote the intense 3 hour/3 course exam which was basically a marathon, I had to pee halfway through but didn't want to waste 5 minutes so I pushed through!

After we finished our last one on Thursday, my group went out for lunch and then had a night of celebrations. For the first time in who knows how long, I went out 2 nights in a row because the OVC fraternity had a toga party so I obviously had to go! Matt came down for that one and it was a great night. I'll post some pictures below if I can find some tame ones - we may be hard workers, but vet students still know how to party!

Today I packed up my apartment (packing is the worsssttt). I'm looking forward to going home and seeing my friends and family - and Daisy!! I haven't been away from her for this long since I've had her - but I'm not excited at all about having to live at home for 4 months. I'm meant to live on my own! But I will take advantage of not having to pay rent or buy groceries or cook all of my meals :)

I doubt I'll post much over the summer because I want to keep this as a vet school blog, not a super personal one. But I'll probably post some highlights :) Matt and I are planning a tropical vacay of some sort, but other than that I'll be working, volunteering at the vet clinic and doing a whoooole lot of sleeping.

So excited to be 25% of a vet!

Wedding dress fitting? Isn't that my job?

Group 9 aka the best group!

Less than 10 days to go :)

As if it's been 2 weeks since I've posted - I've written 6 exams since then!

It's basically just been a whirlwind of exams, hours in the library, and coffee. But I'm surviving! So far we've had:

- Gross Pathology - looking at diseased tissues from dead animals and describing the lesions
- Anatomy and Histology/Pathology bellringers - back to back! We had a tiring 3.5ish hour stretch of a 60 station anatomy bellringer and then the HistoPath one 15 minutes later. I'm glad we had that combo at the beginning of the exam period because it was definitely one of the most intimidating ones.
- Anatomy Live Animal - not worth much, but we had to identify and explain certain structures on a dog, horse, and cow. It seemed like everyone was pretty flustered by this one, especially after working on cadavers all week for the bellringer - live animal stuff is more intimidating when you have the prof standing there staring at you while you answer! I definitely made up some stuff about nerves and arteries in the horse limb hahah but oh well.
- Anatomy Radiology - yes, anatomy is split into a million exams, but this one went really well considering I had almost no radiology experience coming into vet school. I owe that to our amaaazing radiology prof :) We each got one rad and had to interpret it and then discuss it with an instructor. I got a horse hoof, and thankfully I knew what I was looking at!
- Art of Vet Med - basically ethics and communication..aka a lot of writing...and a lot of BS. Only studying for ~1 hour for a vet school exam and still feeling good about it is a rarity for sure; it was a nice breather before the rest of the exams coming up.

Next up - Immunology and Digestive Phys tomorrow - 110 multiple choice so it'll be long, but they're 2 of my favourite sections so I'm hoping it won't be too bad.
Then we have Genetics the day after, which is worth 70% and is generally terrifying because we've hardly had any time to study for it and the course in general is a mess..but I won't get into that. Needless to say tomorrow will be a full day in the library and lots of stress eating (I already put gummy worms in my backpack).

Next week is the Anatomy (yup, more anatomy), Phys and HistoPath written combined final where we have 3 exam books to finish in 3 hours - thankfully we've already studied a lot of the material by studying for the exams we've already had. Repetition is good! And then we finish with Health Management (the 2.5 days we have before the exam are more than enough to study for it) and Phase 1 will be over!! Just crazy (side note my end-of-exam alcohol is already waiting in my freezer).

Sorry this post was all exams, buuut that's all I'm doing with my life at the moment! Bye for now :)