4th Semester in a Nutshell

So I finally let loose...4th Semester was the semester I finally got a little (ok A LOT) crazy, joined some clubs and decided to enjoy school and island life.  Terrified that I would fail out of vet school, I limited my participation in clubs and other extracurricular activities in semesters 1-3 (translation: I didn't do anything but study for my first year here).  I went a little overboard though, this was just a glimpse of what I was able to be a part of last semester:

Pathology Club

•  Weekly club meetings
• 2 necropsies
• Cake off

Rabbit Pathology - Uterine Adenocarcinoma

 - 1st Place!!!

ZEW (Zoo, Exotics, and Wildlife) Club

• Zoo Clean up (Fecal/Mite sample collection)
• Fecal Exam Reading (from samples collected) - My Valentine's present to myself :-)
• Dirt Cup Fundraiser Sale (vanilla/chocolate pudding with oreos and whipped cream with gummy worms on top, ohhhhh yeah!!!)

Small Ruminant Club

• Sheep Processing
• Administering Coccidiostats
• De-worming
• BCS Scoring
• FAMACHA Scoring
• Hoof Trimming
• Horn Trimming

We can't take pictures on campus, but these are the sheep

• Women's Bible Study (weekly on Sunday nights)

• Discipleship (Theology/Apologetics) Bible Study (weekly on Thursday nights)

• Short term Mission Trip preparedness meetings (with a group that was preparing for their April trip to Nicaragua) and to prepare for my trip in August :-D (weekly on Monday nights)

• Good Friday Beach Church Service

• Children's Church Teacher (just for one Sunday)

• Planning for Real Life Real Impact (see this post: http://justanotherrossvetschoolstudentblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/its-been-while.html )

• SCAVMA Meeting to get approval for Christian Veterinary Fellowship (see this post: )

Research Assistant for “Does pain perception and response to pain relieving drugs differ between horses and donkeys?” research project (25 hours for the semester)

• administered dosages of phenylbutazone/placebo (molasses)
• tested their nociceptive responses

I got to wake up to 20 of these faces!!!  I would treat at least one morning/week, treat a few afternoons/week and test one morning/week last semester:

Donkeys!!! (I wish I could take a picture of the actual donkeys, they were so adorable!

Abbatoir visit with the Public Health Club - so much fun!!!  Learning about Meat Inspection

As a part of our semesterly duties we were required to:

• bathe 2 of the kennel dogs (one Saturday morning of the semester)
• clean the aviary (one day of the semester)

Clinic Volunteer day (at the VTH) - As 4th Semesters we get to work one morning in the hospital with our professors/clinicians.

Clinical Skills I learned this past semester:

• Square knots (hand ties and with instruments)
• Surgeon's knots (hand ties and with instruments)
• Miller's knots (hand ties and with instruments)
• Ligatures of large and small vessels/structures
• Simple Interrupted Suture Patterns

This semester was FULL of exams.  Don't get me wrong, I love having lots of opportunities to do well in a class but in a period of 14 weeks we had 14 EXAMS!!!

Not only do that leave less time in my schedule to stay caught up in classes, but each exam also comes with a review session that takes at least 30 minutes.  These are good because you get to determine where you went wrong with the concepts, just do the math 14 exams, 30 minute exam review = 7 hours of just learning from my mistakes!









For my Veterinary Public Health and Epidemiology course I got the first step of my USDA Accreditation (about 10 hours of modules with quizzes).


To top this wonderful and challenging semester off, I was able to visit South Africa for a trip with WildlifeVets to learn about Wildlife Conservation Medicine (see this post:  ).  Such a great experience I had to make a whole separate post about it!

Such a busy semester, but I wouldn't trade all of the practical experience for better grades.  I finally feel like I'm able to connect some concepts with clinical applications and it feels GREAT!

It's been a while...

So for various reasons I have not been able to update my blog, and I apologize.  A huge pet peeve of mine is people that don't follow through with a commitment.  So I will try to do better...

In light of this new commitment I have a whole new post, so here goes:

If you would have told me a year ago that I would spend an entire weekend at an event, without an ounce of studying I would have laughed.  For my whole first year here at Ross University I did nothing but study, rarely went to any social events and only saw the beach from campus or my apartment window.  I would have had an anxiety attack at the thought of spending an ENTIRE day not doing school work.  However, this weekend was a life changing experience.  But let's backup for a second.

Throughout my time here at Ross I have become increasingly involved with "extracurricular activities".  For my second and third semesters I was a part of the Women's Bible Study and last semester I finally joined some of the clubs, did 2 Bible Studies, and worked as a research assistant with the on campus donkeys.  The clubs here are so active with events going on every week; students are so involved!  I have definitely become one of those types of students.  Thankfully, I (at least at this moment in time) have somewhat gotten over my fear of failure and started to enjoy island life, being a student again, and investing in relationships.

This weekend's event was called Real Life Real Impact, sponsored by Christian Veterinary Missions and Nutramax, and brought by Christian Veterinary Fellowship.  This weekend seminar is a spiritual retreat geared toward veterinary students.  During these weekends, students have an opportunity to meet other Christian veterinarians in private practice, talk with some of CVM's long-term missionaries and find out about short-term mission trips.  I got the pleasure of helping to plan this event and have been working hard along with a faculty advisor to plan  It has been such a great learning experience; working through frustrations and changes of plans is NOT my forte, so learning to "let it go" was a skill to be honed.

Here was the brochure that
my marketing team made:

The flier to post on campus***
(more on this a little later):

This was the schedule of events for the weekend:

It was a great weekend for me to learn about the Short-term mission trip that I have planned for August (more on this later) and also a great opportunity to hear about Long-term missions (stay tuned for more on this).  It was amazing to hear that close to 4,000 veterinarians from the US are a part of Christian Veterinary Missions in some capacity.  This is truly where I feel my passion lies; how or if it works out the way I want is yet to be determined.  But just as Kathy Shoenborn mentioned in her talk, God shows us one step at a time where our life is leading.  If we could see the end result - the result 20 steps down the road - we would not learn nearly as much; learning about ourselves and, more importantly, about our relationship with God is what this journey is all about!

Since I have done such a horrible job of keeping this updated, I would like to retroactively update so everyone can fill in the time gap.  It will be a process, but I am committed!  Hopefully I'll have another update before the end of the week.