Endurance

I know that vet-school-related posts have been a little lacking lately, but that's not because school has been particularly busy or bad. It's just been remarkably consistent. Lectures all day, tests, every now and then we have a lab. We also have a lot of large animal courses right now, which, I gotta say, I just don't find very interesting.* It's hard to write about things that I find boring, since I don't want to bore you all, which is why the recent derth of vet school posts.

Judging by the attitude of the class of 2010, school right now is more like an endurance run than the past two years. First year is about trying to live up to the expectations that you had for yourself in undergrad. Second year is about proving your strength- how many tests can you study for at once, how many hours can you spend practicing suture patterns, how many labs can you juggle, how long did you spend standing in one spot while you you doing your first spay surgery.

Third year is, so far, all about how long you can maintain your attention span during our eight or nine or ten hours of lecture per day. We try to stay focused on how close we are to entering clinics (131 days!), or how little time we have to study for boards (only a year away!). But it's hard to escape the feeling that we're never going to be done with these long days of lecture. For now, I try to just keep swimming, and catch those moments of clarity when I know that of course this whole vet school thing is worth it in the end.

*not that cows and horses aren't interesting animals- they are just frustrating to study. Especially horses, which our professors always like to describe as "created when God was having an off day."