Second Year: Day 1

Obligatory first day front porch pic ;)

Is it Christmas Break yet? :)

I just finished my first day of second year and I can already understand why everyone says second year is the hardest.  One of our professors told us that if we thought we covered a lot of material last year, just wait because second year covers at least 10x the amount of material from last year.  Yippee!

Here's a rundown of what classes I'm in this semester:

I started my morning of with General Pathology.  Gen Path is an introduction to basic disease mechanisms and processes.  It's goal is to give us the basic information necessary to understand disease diagnosis and therapy.  We will learn about the causes, pathogenesis, and structural and clinical manifestations of disease.  And yes, I got the word manifestation (and pathogenesis) from the syllabus :)  Today we discussed basic factors of disease.  Then we went to Gen Path Lab.  Today we did a histology review of microscope slides that we learned last fall in Microanatomy.  Future labs will be spent in lab working with slides and tissues, but some days spent in necropsy just to keep things interesting :)  Our professor for this class is the nephew of my boss back home - and there are some crazy similarities between them.  This should be a hard class, but hopefully a good one!

After we finished lab we had Pharmacology.  We didn't take any notes in this class today and just talked about how important pharmacology is in any field of veterinary medicine.  In Pharmacology we'll learn about the interactions of chemical compounds in animals, how to categorize drugs by their mechanisms of action and how the drugs affect physiological systems and pathophysiological condition.  We'll also learn the names of common drugs and how to judge production info from pharmaceutical companies.  I've heard this class is ridiculously hard, but I'm hoping I'll feel as though the information I learn is really relevant.  Obviously it's important.. I'll just need to remind myself that!

Pharmacology lead to lunch time! This meant treating myself to Pizza Hut lunch buffet with some of my labmates... We deserved it :)

To finish my first day up, I had Bacteriology  I'm not sure what all we will be covering in this class, but today we discussed the divisions between eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells and the differences between different types of bacteria.  Mostly it was introductory material we'd covered in undergrad Microbiology.

Study time with the kitty boy!

Tomorrow I'll have my first Parasitology class.    According to that syllabus we'll be learning to identify the parasitic protazoa, helminths, and arthropods of domestic animals and also learn to diagnose, treat, and manage parasites of clinical importance.  Hopefully all of my tick training this summer will come in handy for some of that!

After my first day back I'm completely exhausted and have already started listening to my Titantic Soundtrack Pandora station in preparation for studying.  As you can tell from this picture it didn't take me long to change out of my dress clothes and get comfy with Little Bear today.. He's the best study buddy!

It's go time!

Let's give this second year a whirl :)