Welcome!

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our humble little blog! We decided to throw this little corner of cyberspace together for a few reasons, but our main goal for these posts is to keep our friends and family up to date with what we’re doing during our last year in veterinary school. As third year students in our school’s program, we’re about to be thrust from the warm womb of our cushioned classroom chairs (where we’ve pretty much sat Monday through Friday, 8 to 4-ish, since August 2008) into the chaos that is “clinics.”

Another reason for this blog is to let some of our underclassmen peers get a feel for what we’re going through, and what they can expect in their years to come on the clinic floor. Also, for those out there who may be interested in veterinary medicine or applying to veterinary school, we hope that this will shed some light on this amazing profession that we are both truly blessed to be a part of!

To say the least, we’re very excited to be starting our clinical instruction – ready to finally get our hands on some real patients and use the knowledge that’s been poured into us over the last three years. Our current understanding of how the next year will proceed is this:

We’ll both be required to complete 25 two-week rotations from March to March. Each rotation will have around 3 other students (give or take a couple), who will all work together sharing the duties of that particular area of the hospital. Both of our schedules contain a certain number of core rotations, as well as some elective rotations in our specific areas of interest. This is one reason why we’ve decided to write this blog as a team. While we’re required to learn the principles of both large and small animal medicine at the vet school, Kristin’s electives will reflect her goals of working in the field of small animal medicine & surgery (with dogs, cats and maybe some exotics), while Jess’s will show her goals of going into rural mixed-animal practice (with both large and small animals).

Each student also has two weeks of vacation and the opportunity to take a two-week externship to another clinic or veterinary school. For example, Kristin is taking an externship at a specialty referral hospital [in NYC], in which she’ll be observing/participating in small animal orthopedic surgery. Jess will be taking an externship at a dairy practice [in CA] where she’ll accompany veterinarians in the field performing dairy herd checks and farm calls.

Along with our clinical rotations, we were both hired as student residents here at the teaching hospital. Kristin will be responsible for taking calls and managing emergency patients after-hours at the small animal emergency care service, while Jess will be doing the same for patients at the large animal clinic. This is a unique student opportunity at our veterinary school and will provide us with invaluable life experience when it comes to managing and triaging emergency cases in the future.

After the completion of our 25 clinical rotations, we’ll be required to participate in an 8 week preceptorship. Basically, we’ll be working at a clinic for two months under the mentorship of other licensed veterinarians and gaining clinical experience outside of the teaching hospital environment. Neither of us has decided where we’ll be doing our preceptorship yet, but we’ll keep you informed when we finally figure it out.

One final thought to leave you all with on this first posting – we could not be here today without the grace of God, the love and support of our families and friends, or the education & opportunities that Auburn has bestowed upon us. For all this, we are so thankful! We hope that you enjoy reading our posts – we’ll do our best to update as often as we can! Feel free to drop us a line or ask any questions, we’d love to hear from you.

With love (and a tremendous amount of excitement about this next year),

K&J