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A Spring Break Surprise

Ali and Spencer Selfie
Ali and Spencer, newly engaged

Spring Break has come and gone in a flash!

I traveled to Utah’s Zion National Park with my boyfriend, Spencer, and we camped for three days under the Utah stars. Being used to waking up at 6 a.m. for school, it wasn’t hard for me to adjust to our early-morning hikes, but for Spencer, it was a bit harder! Beating the Spring Break crowd is a priority, because being in nature surrounded by loud strangers is never ideal. My favorite hike was up Angel’s Landing, one of the most coveted spots to hike in North America. Half of the trail is a series of 21 brutal uphill switchbacks, which make your legs (and lungs) shaky like Jell-O. A sedentary, studying lifestyle has somehow failed to put me in peak mountain-climbing shape.

mischievous chipmunk
The mischievous chipmunk that stole Ali’s lunch

The last half of the hike has chains built into the mountain, a narrow rock path, and cliffs on either side of you. I kept telling myself, “Don’t look down.” But it never worked. I repeatedly looked down and kept scaring myself. Six people have died climbing that cliff face since 2004, so it must be taken seriously.

Unexpectedly, as we were watching the early morning sun cover the canyon, Spencer got down on one knee and proposed to me. I said yes, of course, but was too afraid to wear the ring down the mountain, so I put it back in the box until we got to stable ground at the bottom. I am very excited to finish my last year of vet school in the clinics, marry him, and start our life together in 2019!Once at the top of Angel’s Landing, you can see across the entire Zion Canyon that has been explored by humans for thousands of years. It was a breathtaking view and a great reward for the challenging trip up to the summit!

Our second hike was up to Observation Point, a little higher and lengthier than Angel’s Landing, but a much less terrifying hike. There was a family of chipmunks at the top that were feistier than any animal I have ever met. National parks tell you to “Please do not feed the wildlife” when they really should warn you that wildlife will sneak into your backpack and drag your PBJ out of it. I never knew something so adorable could be so mischievous!

After not showering for three days, we headed to Las Vegas to celebrate our engagement with family. Someone asked me, “How are you going to study when you have a wedding to plan?” and I really have no idea. Being a vet student leaves us with such little time to think about anything except for vet school, but I think I will have to take some steps back and prioritize what is important!

We also traveled to the Hoover Dam, which is only 30 minutes away from Vegas in Boulder City. It is so much bigger than I could have ever imagined, and I cannot imagine the feat that it was to build it in 1935 to block the Colorado River.

I was curiously wandering around and found a dog’s grave near the entrance. The plaque states that the dog rode the bus and accompanied the workers to their job sites every day. But then, one day, he was sleeping and was run over by a truck and was mourned by the workers and buried under the guard tower. Such a special tribute to man’s best friend!

My Spring Break was a very needed respite from the stresses of vet school, so that I am fully recharged and ready to take on my last semester and last full year of clinics. I am slightly regretful of the amount of things that piled up over the week off; however, I know I will find a way to catch up, like I always do.

Dam DogAlong with tests, quizzes, and projects due this week, we are also getting ready for our Vet School Open House that is coming up this Saturday. I am volunteering to present a surgery simulation where we show what veterinary surgeons look like gowned, masked, and gloved-up in the operating room. It is always so much fun interacting with kids and adults who share our passion for animals and science. Hopefully, we can inspire some little minds to join this amazing and rewarding profession!

Receiving Our Fourth-Year Schedules

TaylorLast week we received our fourth-year clinical rotation schedules! During your fourth year of veterinary school, you complete 24, two-week clinical rotations throughout the different services in the Small and Large Animal Hospitals and have some time set aside throughout the year for externships and vacation.

We third-year students selected our tracks (small animal, large animal, mixed animal, food animal, or alternative) back in November and ranked our preferences for some of the services in the Small and Large Animal Hospitals. Needless to say, we’ve all been anxiously awaiting the arrival of our rotation schedules for the past three months! As soon as we got the email that our rotation schedules were in our mailboxes, most of my classmates excitedly ran over to get our schedules and immediately started comparing them to see which rotations we may have together. The whole class was abuzz with excitement! To be honest, I could barely pay attention in class the rest of the day because I was just too excited to focus!

In my fourth year, I will start out in general surgery and then go to the Houston ASPCA for my first two clinical rotations. I’m very excited to start on these rotations because I will gain further experience spaying and neutering dogs and cats, which will give me great confidence and allow me to apply these skills during my externships later in the year. I’m also excited to complete the small animal emergency/critical care rotation, because I have not had a lot of experience with emergency cases in the past and am interested to learn more about how to stabilize and treat emergent patients. I’ll also rotate through many other services in the hospitals including cardiology, radiology, food animal medicine, equine field services, dermatology, and anesthesiology, just to name a few. I’m so excited for fourth year, and I can’t wait to see cases, interact with patients daily, and finally get to put the knowledge and skills that I have learned for the past three years into practice!

I honestly cannot believe that I’m in my final semester of classes before entering the clinics! Vet school has really gone by fast! It’s scary and exciting to think that in just a little over one year I will graduate and finally achieve my lifelong goal of becoming a veterinarian!

Planning for the Future

Sydney M.Well, I made it to my last semester before entering my fourth year of vet school, when I will be completing my clinical rotations in the Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital! I can’t believe how fast the time has gone, but now, the real future planning starts. I am amazed at how much A&M is preparing us for our future. They put a lot of effort into providing us with resources and opportunities to grow in our profession and graduate confident in that knowledge.

This semester started with a choice of which prep course to get for the NAVLE. The NAVLE is the exam you have to take in your fourth year of vet school to become a licensed veterinarian. I will be taking the NAVLE in November or December of this year. In order to quickly be able to review everything we have learned during our vet school journey, we sign up for online prep courses that guide us through important topics. I just signed up for one of the prep courses, and it’s now becoming real just how close I am to my fourth year and graduation!

This semester has already been jammed-packed with new knowledge for not only veterinary medicine, but also for financial and business knowledge. This semester, the third-year students are taking a class called “Practice Management,” in which we learn to effectively manage a veterinary practice when we graduate, as well as basic business skills for our resumes and cover letters, the hiring process, and personal finances. I am really excited about this class because I believe that I will gain great insight on life outside of vet school, which will help me make great choices when I graduate. The class has guest lecturers who discuss different topics. So far, we have covered resumes and cover letters, and the pros and cons of building a vet clinic or whether it’s better to buy an existing clinic. I am excited to hear the rest of the lectures throughout the semester!

Another way to help with your future planning is by joining the Veterinary Business Management Association (VBMA), an organization that is great for helping you plan for the business aspect of veterinary medicine. I joined VBMA in my second year and I have learned so much from this group. The VBMA offers several ways for you to boost your resume for the future. One way is through the business certification program, in which you attend 16 hours of business lectures hosted by the VBMA before you graduate from vet school. If you attend the lectures, you graduate with a business certificate, which will help set you apart from other applicants. In January, the VBMA holds a Professional Development Symposium with lectures that provide additional business knowledge. I just attended this seminar and was able to finish all of my hours for the certificate, so I am really proud of myself for sticking with it during vet school.

With all of this future-planning, I am getting excited for the next step in my career!

My Dog Timmy

Michelle's Dog: TimmyThis is my family dog, Timmy.

Every time I visit my parents’ home in Hurst, I can always rely on him to greet me as if I have been gone for a century when it’s really only been a week. It’s definitely cold days like these when I miss his warm dog cuddles and appreciate how my furry companion has improved my life!

Timmy somehow stumbled into my life when I was just 13 years old. A close friend of my family’s had just had a baby and were uncertain about how the puppy would do around a newborn, so they decided to surrender Timmy and offered him to our family. Worried about the time constraints and responsibilities of raising a puppy, my parents, of course, said “No!”

But, somehow, Timmy still managed to get into my duffel bag and made it home with us that same night. It took a lot of dedication and puppy-training classes for Timmy to be the good dog that he is today, but I loved growing up with him and every challenge along the way!

The thing I value the most about raising a dog is that they teach you responsibility and empathy. Caring for Timmy forced me into a position where I had to consider the needs of another living being over my own. Pets, obviously, cannot vocalize their wants and needs, and, therefore, owners must rely on their pet’s nonverbal cues to determine what to do. Growing up with Timmy, I was able to discover the importance of human-animal bond, and his existence in my life solidified my passion to become a veterinarian.

Timmy is now 15 years old and still going strong. He enjoys staying healthy with my parents through their daily walks. He has definitely lived an adventurous life and has managed to put a smile on our faces every step of the way!

Tracking Food Animal

Michelle M.Now that Christmas break has come and gone and we are now back at school this week for spring semester, I am finally in the homestretch of my path of becoming a veterinarian. After my spring semester finals, I will be going straight into my clinical year this May. During our clinical year, each student takes a core set of rotations in both the small and large animal hospitals, since as veterinarians we are licensed to work on all species.

But for the remaining rotations, we get to pick a track that most closely follows what we are interested in doing once we graduate. I want to work primarily with dairy cattle, so before break I chose the food animal track. I will spend several rotations in the Food Animal Department, where they treat food and fiber animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, llamas, alpacas, pigs, and even the occasional camel. I then have the opportunity to conduct externships that will give me more experience in my chosen field.

Because I am hoping to get a job as a dairy veterinarian when I graduate, last summer I spent time in the Texas Panhandle working with dairy veterinarians. There, I worked to develop skills in areas such as diagnosing a cow as pregnant, hoof care, drawing blood for testing, and surgical techniques. I also participated in an externship back near my home in Pennsylvania, where I got more dairy and small ruminant experience.

My externships this next year will be across the country so that I hopefully will gain a better idea of how dairy medicine is done throughout the United States.  I will be going to California, Oregon, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and the Panhandle again to get more experience under different veterinarians.  I’m looking forward to what the next year and a half will hold for me. It’s hard to believe how soon I will be making medical decisions and helping patients, and I can’t wait to see what I will learn!

Looking Back and Ahead

Sydney M.Wow! This semester has just flown by! It seems like I just started classes again, but, instead, I just completed my finals.

In my last block for the semester, I took two electives, “Clinical Pathology” and “Emergency Medicine.” Clinical pathology is understanding disease processes and how they commonly present themselves using diagnostic tests such as blood work or cytology. Knowing how often veterinarians in practice read bloodwork, I was excited to be able to practice those skills and increase my confidence level before my fourth year. Emergency medicine was great because it helped me create a plan for the worst outcome, in hopes of saving lives. Having a basic idea of what to do in emergency situations helps give you a framework and the confidence to face those challenging cases head on. I have really enjoyed my electives this semester because I love how clinically relevant they are and how much they are preparing me for not only fourth year, but when I am out in a regular, practice setting.

Also during my last block was the Veterinary Job and Externship Fair. The Dean’s Office is great at making sure we are given a ton of opportunities to meet veterinarians and find great places to work for summer jobs, fourth-year externships, or even potential future employment! The fourth year of vet school is the clinical year, which means you work at the Small and Large Animal Hospitals to get tons of on-the-job training from the clinicians who work there full time. However, we are not confined to just one hospital for training; we also do externships for two weeks at a time at other veterinary clinics. I found one externship in New Braunfels, but I need to find another clinic to work during my fourth year, so this job and externship fair was a great way for me to do it.

While I have been able to do some hands-on and exciting things this semester, I still have a lot to look forward to during winter break, not only because I get to see my family and get some much needed rest, but also because I have an elective over the break at a clinic in Seguin, where I will focus on the client-communication aspects of veterinary medicine, as well as hone some basic veterinary skills. A veterinarian will be my mentor and will help me work through cases and put all of my lecture knowledge to good use. This winter break elective counts toward the total amount of elective hours I need to fulfill my veterinary degree, so the veterinarian at the clinic will evaluate my progress and send it back to Texas A&M.

There were so many fun and important things happening at the end of this semester and more that will happen over winter break. I am excited to be a part of it all!

Finals, Coffee, and Bears—Oh my!

Finals week is upon us!

Ali C.There is truly nothing like a finals week in veterinary school, where it seems you learn an entire semester in one night! There is so much to remember and never enough time, so you are forced to learn as much as you can, do your best, and still be satisfied with never knowing all of the information.

Third-year vet students are lucky and only have three finals this year—but they are all worth a LOT of points, so they cannot be taken lightly. The first final exam is in “Large Animal Medicine,” over 29 hours worth of lectures. No pressure, right?! Our second exam is in “Small Animal Medicine” and ranges from placing external fixators on bones to how to tell if a female dog is pregnant. Our third exam is over “Radiology,” and since it is cumulative, we have to study things from all the way back in August.

Finals week and veterinary students are like hibernating bears and winter. We stock up on food and supplies, wear our comfiest clothes, and lock ourselves in our rooms/library for a week straight, only emerging from the cave for refrigerated items and the scheduled cup of coffee at 6 a.m., noon, and 5 p.m. Our hair always seems to be disheveled, no matter how much we comb it down. We may be sensitive to sunlight and show signs of aggression. Every now and then a friend or family member will check in to make sure we are still eating and sleeping an acceptable amount.

The end of the semester is when we really appreciate those gift cards for Starbucks and Chick-Fil-A that we get in our stockings every year (hint hint, Santa). While it is OK to cry during finals week, I encourage relieving stress in ways like yoga, running, singing Adele songs unapologetically loud in your car, or studying
outside in your favorite park. Resist your innate hibernating instincts. The good thing about December in Texas is the low temperature is usually around 65 degrees and sunny; you basically have no excuse NOT to go outside. It is also important to find a reliable friend who will share their dog with you; hugging a dog will increase study motivation by 200 percent. I have tested and proven this scientific fact my entire life. You also may want to keep the TV playing in the background while you study to stay minimally connected to the outside world.

One thing I have noticed about vet school is that every finals week seems to get better:

  • First year was the hardest: between anatomy, immunology, and histology, there’s a lot of nuances to learn, and you’ve never done it before—therefore, it is completely intimidating and foreign.
  • Second year gets easier: the material is quicker to master and you also have gained the confidence that “if I survived first year, I can get through anything.”
  • Third year we are barely even phased: we have done this MULTIPLE TIMES before, and there is also the hope lingering in the air that this is the second to last finals weeks we will ever have for the rest of our lives!

It’s amazing that another semester of vet school has flown by so quickly; nevertheless, I do not yet wish for it to slow down. Although we may emerge from our caves on Dec. 8 sleep-deprived and wired on caffeine, we also emerge smarter, more resilient, and one step closer to being the veterinarians we were born to be.

Wish us all good luck!

Terra, the ‘Service Dog’

Mikaela and Terra
Mikaela and Terra

Recently, I was able to bring my dog, Terra, to school! That is one of the perks of being a veterinary student—sometimes we get to all bring our pets to class.

We needed her for our orthopedics laboratory, in which we were learning to do a proper orthopedic exam and how to apply a splint. Nothing beats the real thing when it comes to practicing, and Terra was a willing patient (for a lot of treats).

We started out by just watching her walk in a straight line from the front, back, and sides to see her gait and how she moves. This can help you identify if there is a lame leg and which one it could be. Then you do the same thing at a jog. After that, we do a standing exam and you feel over all the joints for anything that is out of the ordinary. It is important to feel both sides at the same time to compare the two sides.

Following the standing exam, Terra got to lay down and we went through all the ranges of motion on each joint to make sure she had full movement in each without pain. Through this whole thing, she was just getting pets and treats and thought it was the best thing. Turns out, she is a pretty good patient.

After the ortho exam we went to the bandaging lab! But, first, we needed to give all the pups a chance to relax, so we went outside for a puppy party! Terra played with a 6-month-old Whippet named Goose, and they are now best friends. We also played fetch for a while so she would be tired and lay still for the bandage.

When we went inside, each of my group members got to practice making a splint and securing it to the body. We did Terra’s front legs, one at a time. There is a lot of padding and you need to make sure the placement of everything is correct so that there is no way for the animal to get hurt from the bandage that is supposed to be helping heal.

Once we wrapped the leg she was allowed to stand to see how she would move in it. At first, she tried to go backward; apparently all dogs do this to try and walk out of the bandage, but once I showed her some treats in front of her, she was basically running to get them. The splint was not going to slow her down. We took it off after a couple minutes and then the other leg was done.

All in all, we had a great day of learning, and it’s always fun to bring your dog to school. Because we are veterinary students, many of our animals are used to being handled, having their hearts listened to, and being our models. We love them so much, and they are willing to help us with our education.

So, really, for Terra, this lab was just another day as a veterinary student’s dog.

Looking Forward to my Last Break

Michelle C.This upcoming Christmas break will be my last as a student, as my peers and I will be entering clinics immediately after the conclusion of the third-year veterinary curriculum. I have been meticulously planning to get the most out of the four-week break, during which I will be spending two weeks doing a veterinary externship in Dallas and the remaining time traveling with family and friends.

Externships offer students an exciting opportunity to spend two to six weeks under a direct doctor mentorship to apply the clinical skills obtained during the first three years of veterinary school and ease the transition from classroom to clinical practice. I am really looking forward to the externship experience, as I feel more confident interpreting blood work and other laboratory data than I have ever been.

Needless to say, I am also very excited to travel! My advice to all future students is that you should use your free time to travel spontaneously. Whether it is visiting distant families out of state or going on a road trip with your significant other, it will greatly enhance your soul! I definitely plan on spending a lot of time with my family this winter break, since I wont be able to visit them very often during my fourth year.

But until then, everyone is buckling down and preparing for our final exams. Stress is high, but I am grateful to have such great, supportive classmates and faculty members who are always there to help us succeed. Good luck on finals, everybody!

Learning through Labs

Michelle M.After the gauntlet of the first two years of veterinary school, it really is nice to experience some of the perks of third year. We get to put a lot of what we learned our first two years of school into use, especially during our lab periods. Just this past week, our Small Animal Medicine class had us practicing a procedure called a pericardiocentesis, a procedure that involves inserting a needle through the body wall and into the pericardium, the sac that surrounds the heart, so that the fluid can be drained. This may be necessary in certain patients to remove excess fluid to make them feel better and also so that the fluid can be tested to determine what may be causing the patient’s problem. My class was able to practice this on some pretty cool models that simulate how it will feel to perform the procedure in a live patient one day.

We previously had several large-animal labs. My favorite was the ophthalmology lab, which gave us practice in procedures with the equine eye. We were able to use live horses and do a full ophthalmic exam. We also practiced performing auriculopalpebral nerve blocks; these blocks involve injecting a small amount of lidocaine near the auriculopalpebral nerve, which will temporarily prevent the horse from blinking. Since we can’t ask the horse to hold his eye open for us like human doctors can, this nerve block is a very useful technique to learn, as it makes the exam more pleasant for the horse and also much quicker for everyone. We were then able to use an ophthalmoscope to perform a fundic exam to determine if the eye is healthy or if there are any problems.

In addition to our medicine labs, I also had a large-animal skills lab this semester, during which we were able to help improve our large animal-handling skills with cattle, pigs, goats, and horses and perform some of the routine procedures we will do as vets one day, such as trimming feet and drawing blood for testing. It was always the highlight of my week to work with these animals, as I plan on becoming a large-animal vet after I graduate. I even got to learn how to shoe a horse using a horse leg model that was more realistic than I ever could have anticipated. While farriers are often the ones who put shoes on horses, it was fascinating to learn how the process is done and important to understand so that we can properly care for horses who injure their hooves. Next semester I will have small-animal skills labs and I am looking forward to seeing what I will learn there. It’s really encouraging learning some of the skills I will be using on a daily basis when I am on clinics full-time next year. I can’t wait to see what I will learn next!