Cunningham and Dyce are my new best friends

Week 1. Complete. Only 14 weeks til Christmas break and 110 weeks until you can call me Dr. Kauffman.

We finished up our 3 day orientation at the farm working with the horses (my favorite). A lot of it was stuff I already knew but some of the Irish terminology was different. We learned how to make an initial physical examination including lunging the horse at a canter to monitor respiratory rate as well as giving oral medication, taking blood samples and restraint techniques.  After this exhausting but really fascinating 3 days on the farm, a lot of the vet students went out in the City Centre for a few beers, a little whiskey and a lot of dancing. I can't say that the Dublin club scene is for me. A lot of it is geared toward a younger "undergraduate" crowd. The pubs on every other corner are my favorites. There are enough of them that we could go out every weekend and not go to the same one twice. I have yet to find one with really good live traditional Irish music but it's only my second week, so I'll give it some time and a bit of exploring.

Classes started this week. I'm taking 6 courses this term including Homeostasis & Fluid Balance; Cells, Tissues, Organs & Development; Cell Metabolism & Replication (Biochem); Cardiology & Respiratory; Neurobiology & Head Structure; and Animal Behaviour & Welfare. The first 5 are classroom taught classes and Animal Behaviour is actually a online class. We have a 7th course on top of that but we don't have grades in it until next term; there are just a handful of lectures that we are auditing this term since they're in tandem with a couple other courses in undergrad at UCD. So likes a lot, right? You can say that again. Though the cool thing about all these classes is that they are interconnected, and we'll be able to go into more detail with such specific courses. Also the courses incorporate both structure and function and teach them together.  So as we learn about all the body systems, we'll be able to place them in context with anatomy labs and dissections. We've already been down in the dissection lab looking at bones and radiographs. I'm pretty sure that this kind of lab work will be my favorite. This week alone we got assigned 9 chapters of reading between 2 of our books: Veterinary Physiology by Cunningham and Veterinary Anatomy by Dyce.  And all that is just The second year grad entry vet students joke about sleeping with Dyce (falling asleep while doing readings) and having dates with Cunningham (lots of reading assignments).

They say that getting into vet school is the hardest part. And that's probably true, because even through this first week all of the professors and staff have assured us that if we all had the ability to get in here, they would make sure that we could all get out of here in 4 years as good veterinarians (and their peers). It's just seems like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow right now.