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New Year’s Resolution

 

People often say that hindsight is 20/20 and nowhere have I seen that to be more true than in my first semester of veterinary school. Looking back, there are many things I’m very proud of but also many things I hope to change for this next semester. Because of this, I decided to make some resolutions for my first semester in 2020. I’ll start with the things I was proud of and that I am going to make an effort to continue.

 

Last semester, I was very happy with how consistently I exercised and the goal I had to get to know as many of my classmates as possible. While I haven’t been able to meet everyone yet, I have made some very close friends that I’ll be able to reach out to even after I graduate. As for my new resolutions, I decided to only make two so that they would be easy to keep track of.

 

The first goal I have is to try to gain experience in as many aspects of veterinary medicine as possible. My background in veterinary medicine is mainly small animal, but I really want to see all types of medicine before I pick my track in my third year of school.

My second resolution is to improve my study habits. I had very good study habits as an undergraduate, but about a month into my first semester of veterinary school, I realized I was going to have to relearn how I studied; there just simply wasn’t enough time to do as much test preparation as I used to.

Toward the end of last semester, I began to figure out what methods worked the best for me, and now my goal is to continue to develop those methods so that I can become much more efficient at learning all of the new material.

As I was thinking of my resolutions, I decided to reach out to some of my new friends at school and see if they had made any themselves. A lot of them had, so I want to share them here, as well, for anyone who is looking for resolution ideas.

One of my friends is taking the approach of making three new goals each month. This month, she is striving to drink a gallon of water each day, take 10,000 steps a day, and practice intermittent fasting. Another of my friends has a much smaller goal of simply not buying Cheetos from the vending machine during our long afternoons of class.

 

Yet another friend is trying to focus on keeping her car cleaner throughout the year. And the last friend told me that her goal is to continue to kick butt in veterinary school and support her fellow “DVM Queens” in the process. My resolutions and my friends’ resolutions have motivated me to start this second semester off strong and to push myself to be better both in school and in my life outside of school. I hope everyone is able to start their year off strong and succeed at any resolutions they have made for themselves.

Finding Extracurriculars During Vet School

Before starting at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, I knew that it was going to be important for me to have a life outside of class because I easily get so hyper-focused on my academic obligations that I get burned out.

 

Extracurriculars were my plan to keep myself energized. I knew that there would be clubs for students to join and outside activities for us to get involved in, but I never could have imagined how many options we would have.

 

On the first day of orientation, we were presented with over two-dozen student clubs that we could join. These clubs ranged from Cat Club to Internal Medicine to Green Vets to the Veterinary Medicine Business Association.

 

Outside of these clubs there were a lot of events for us to attend, including a CVM BBQ, a mentor-mentee taco dinner, and a Calf-Fry with live music. I quickly learned that there is definitely no shortage of ways for me to be engaged with my classmates outside of class.

 

I have also always been someone who relieves stress through physical activity. As an undergraduate, I did this through intramural sports, so I wanted to find this in the veterinary school as well.

 

To do this, I decided to run for and was elected to be one of the Health and Wellness Representatives for my class. One of my responsibilities in this job is to organize intramural teams, and I am excited to say that we will be playing sand volleyball, flag football, and ultimate frisbee this semester!

 

The first few weeks of veterinary school have definitely been stressful, but having all of these exciting opportunities outside of class has made it so much more fun.