Orientation

So, summer came and went and now I'm in VET SCHOOL. I still can't believe it. Orientation started this week. First I had to make the cross country journey. My parents were nice enough to come along and help me get set up. I am settling in well but I miss everyone already. Leaving Christian was probably the hardest thing I've had to do in my life. I had a great summer with him and his family on a cruise and everything.
All of my room mates are very nice. Christina, the vet student in my class, even took my parents and I to a Dodgers baseball game.
Orientation is exhausting. I've never had a week long orientation before, and meeting so many new people that you know you have to spend the next 4 years with is just...exhausting. Especially for an introvert, but more on that later. Most of it is them telling us either how much we will have to get used to working in groups all the time for Problem Based Learning (PBL) or them telling us how we're not going to have a life the next 4 years.
Today we did some fun exercises with the class of 107 students (only about 15 guys and the rest of us are girls). In the morning we got in our PBL groups for our first actual session. It went pretty well, except for the earthquake we had to evacuate for in the middle of it, my first California earthquake. It was a little hard to nudge my thoughts into the group conversation and it was hard for me when other people said what I was going to say first, it threw me off. For the most part though everyone in the group seems to bring their own unique experiences to the table and provide background knowledge on the cases that way. It was a little overwhelming with how many learning issues we came up with just off of a very simple case. We really have a ton to learn. This first sort of trial case was a 12 week old Great Dane puppy who presented with "wiggling things in her stool" reported by the owner. Of course I knew it was tapeworms right away but they don't want you to jump to conclusions, even though that's what we did in my practice everyday. They want you to think of all the possibilities and then make a "learning issue" out of everything, even when they mention the vaccine that the puppy was to get that day, we are to look up the immunology behind it. And when they mention she's on puppy food we look into nutritional differences between adult and puppy food down to needs of bone growth and their mechanisms.
We basically have to search all resources available to the world for everything. The second years have given us a list of books they've used and did a survey on them but there are still a ton to pick from in so many different topics. Some say they just use online books or books from the library and others get everything. In the past I've always liked knowing what to study and that it was probably in my text book, in a certain chapter or notes (except for chemistry sometimes). With PBL it's all on you to find it in any resource and you don't even know for sure what topics you're supposed to be looking up for the case. I really think I will learn a ton more, and actually retain the information much better this way, it's just going to be a lot of work.
In the afternoon, after our fancy CVMA lunch at the Sheraton, we did Myers-Briggs personality exercises in effort to get us to realize that our class mates sometimes think differently and we need to understand their stressors and how we all need each other to work in groups. For each of the Myers-Briggs categories, for example introversion and extroversion, they had us go to separate sides of the room depending on which we were. There was a lot of tension and people thinking they were better than each other. In the end it made us realize what our classmates might deal with but I feel like they caused more conflict and tension than any good. To be honest, seeing all of the extroverts being loud and shouting about all of the things they dislike about introverts didn't really make me respect them any more. But, we each saw the positive aspects of each personality type and how we need both in our groups.
This weekend is the white coat and convocation ceremony. Which is kind of like an initiation ceremony and where they put our white lab coats on us for the first time. Christian is flying out to come and to visit me. I'm super excited to see him. I do have to drive to LAX to get him though, which I'm not so thrilled about doing at 5:30 on a Friday. From my experience so far, LA is the most frustrating place to drive on the planet. Hopefully it doesn't take me 5 hours to drive what would be 45 minutes. Wish me luck!