On to different things

Capstone is over (well, the scary, closed-book, in-class part of capstone that I'm actually talking about when I say "capstone" is over). 191 multiple choice questions, plus some short answer/essay questions. All in all it wasn't too bad.

I feel that as I've gone through the last 2 years of vet school, I get better at taking exams. Well, maybe "better" isn't the right word. Maybe "efficient" is more accurate. I can pretty much know with my first skim of a question if it's something I have any chance of knowing, or if I'm honestly going to be stuck guessing randomly among the 5 possible answers no matter how much time I spend trying to pick my brain for tiny bits of information from the last 24 months.

So I guess that doesn't probably help me answer a greater number of questions correctly, but it sure cuts down on the stress and strain of staring at a question that you just don't know the answer to, and stressing yourself out about what answer you're going to pick, and going back and re-reading it, and changing your mind, then re-changing your mind, and on and on. I've learned to just let those questions go.

That's not to say that the majority of the questions on today's exam were like that - although there were a distinct few. More often, I knew the answer or had a reasonble suspicion, enough to narrow it down to a couple of choices.

At this point I have a lot more of the online portion of capstone done than I expected to; honestly, I wasn't even planning on working on it until this week or next (I intended to get the big scary part out of the way first). But one of the nice things about online capstone is that most classes have an in-class part and an online part, and by completing or at least looking at the online part, you can get an idea of how difficult that professor's questions will be, how in-depth they will go in the in-class questions, and what material has already been emphasized on the online portion, and thus (hopefully) you won't need to know as well for the in-class exam.

Really it's a just bunch of "strategizing" that my classmates and I do to take our minds off the looming exam and make ourselves feel better about how little studying we've done, or how unprepared we feel. I actually felt pretty good about my studying this year (thank you, box office), although I will admit to having some moments of panic during the last 2 or 3 days. (Especially when I realized on Saturday afternoon that I hadn't even opened my therio binder, my most hated and boring class from last semester. Thank the good Lord that those instructors had a TA who posted "take home messages" from every single lecture, or I never would have gotten through it.)

What's coming up next? An early morning tomorrow - getting up around 6 am, leaving the house at 6:45 to arrive at the VTH in time to get myself organized and change into scrubs and clinic smock and start my "Surgical Principles Laboratory" rotation. Tomorrow morning promises 4 hours of SPL fun: 2 hours of aseptic technique, 1 hour of pack prep, and 1 hour patient preparation.

Then I will actually have an hour-long break for lunch! And I will (at least theoretically) have said break for lunch every single day! I never realized (okay, maybe I did) how annoying some of those lunch-hour business classes were until I finally got to this semester, when I have no business class. But don't worry, I'm sure rotations will end up going past the scheduled end time of 12 pm and will cut into my lunch time so that I feel back to normal again.

The afternoon is just 2 hours of Clinical Sciences III tomorrow. Actually, Clinical Sciences ("ClinSci") is just about our only course this fall - we have ClinSci III through mid-October, and ClinSci IV after that till December. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why they divide it into 2 separate courses like that. It made a little more sense last semester, when ClinSci I was all GI disease (well, plus endocrine disease) and ClinSci II was all respiratory and cardiac disease. ClinSci III, however, contains such diverse topics as (on the small animal side of things) osteoarthritis, reproduction, seizures, vestibular disease, and incontinence, and (on the large animal side of things) equine hoof care, mare breeding management, bovine infertility, large animal neurology, and urinary disease. We have 1 hour of large animal and 1 hour of small animal every day.

I only have 2 other classes: Principles of Imaging Interpretation II (a continuation of last spring's xray interpretation course), and an elective called Alternative & Complementary Therapeutics. That second one meets from 5-6 pm on Mondays (yeesh) but should cover some cool stuff like acupuncture that I'm at least mildly interested in, especially since I didn't get the alternative medicine rotation as one of my electives this year. Imaging Interpretation meets on Mon & Wed afternoons.

I guess that's all I can say about tomorrow... Happy First Day of School!