"Professionalism, Communication, and Life-long Learning"

*deep breath* This is going to be a long one. =P

First, though, a bit about Tuesday and Wednesday. We spent Monday night with the Roberts, since we had no bed or any furniture really in the apartment. We got up bright and early on Tuesday and drove our Budget truck back to the apartment to perform a final few tasks before the move. Mom and Dad met us there and picked up some things we were returning and helped us move the electronics (including the big tv) into the truck. I did some final cleaning (like Piper's litterbox), we checked our mail one last time, I turned in our keys to the office, and away we went. Piper was sitting in the middle of the truck cab, her cage set upon my backpack. She was pretty good the whole time, just meowing occasionally. We let her out a couple times and generally she was so scared that she was happy to return to her carrier. We got to College Station around lunchtime, and the carpet was all done on our side except for Emily's closet. So, we started unloading...and sweating. It was 107 on Tuesday. Yikes. While Emily and Matt struggled with fun things like the couch, I painted the baseboards. :) In the afternoon Matt had to take me to get my picture taken for vet school. It was insanely easy - I walked in, picked up my name off a table, sat down, *click,* I reviewed the picture, said "that's fine," and walked out. Then we finished unloading and I started messing around with unpacking boxes and arranging.

On Wednesday, Matt and I went to Target and the grocery store. We were able to find most of what we needed. Some things we couldn't get - a shelf, one of those plastic things that goes on your carpet to roll your desk chair on - and some we needed to wait - curtains are waiting for Mom and Leslie's expertise. The grocery store was crazy, having to almost totally stock up the kitchen. The only things I had moved were spices and some basics that were worth holding on to. Then we got that all settled and I worked on unpacking the kitchen. Also on Wednesday we got our cable internet and Directv hooked up...the Directv has a couple stories with it. 1) They screwed up our order and didn't bring a third receiver, so we couldn't get tv in our room. But the guy hinted that he'd set it up so if we bought a receiver at Best Buy, the cords were all set to just plug it in. He also left his cell phone number =P and 2) Matt talked him into not switching our local channels from Dallas to College Station. The benefits of this are twofold: we don't have to watch the ridiculously crappy local stuff they have here, and Matt gets to watch Dallas sports instead of Houston sports. He was happy. Emily took Matt to the airport in the afternoon, and I took the time to play on the internet and mess around with some more unpacking. When I checked my vet school e-mail I finally found out what time I had to be at school for orientation the next day. For a graduate program, some of the things with A&M have been awfully disorganized it seems!

I woke up this morning with close to "first day of school" jitters. Emily was kind enough to transport me to the vet school, and I arrived before the 8am scheduled continental breakfast hosted by the US Army Houston Health Care Team (they want us to be all that we can be). Again things seemed disorganized, because we were lined up forever going through to get our food. We also got our folders with our orientation schedule, our class schedule, a bunch of other papers, our lab assignment (A or B - our lectures are all together as a class but we are split into 2 groups for labs to halve the size; I am 'B'), and our name tags. We have to wear our name tags all the time, and every class has a different color, so you can just glance at it and know if they are a 1VM, 2VM, etc. Ours is maroon! Then the real orientation started. I'll go through the day...

• 8:30 - Welcome
• 8:45 - "Expectations of the professional" by the Associate Dean, Dr. Rogers. She was really cool and has a fun sense of humor. She's only been in this position since July, but has been with A&M for decades. This is where we learned that the title of this post is our class' motto of sorts. Joy.
• 9:00 - CVM Faculty Mentoring Program explanation, and introduction of the professional program staff. There are about 8 students assigned to each faculty mentor. Mine is Dr. Hoffman, my anatomy prof.
• 9:15 - "Communication Skills" - This was a lecture by one of the large animal docs. He was really funny...had a thick Lubbock accent and amusing Power Point slides. Unfortunately it was a 45 minute long talk and thus inevitably eventually boring.
• 10:00 - break!
• 10:15 - "Overview of the DVM Curriculum & Introduction of the Fall Semester First-Year Faculty" - this was little more than "that's Dr. Hoffman, your anatomy professor, that's Dr. Landis, your physiology professor..."
• 10:30 - two different vets each talked about a case, one large animal and one small, where they could point out ... I guess ... why you learn stuff in vet school? I don't really know the point. But the large animal guy was hilarious in his talk about parturition hypocalcemia, aka milk fever.
• 11:00 - a talk by a Hill's Pet Nutrition guy (heard of "Science Diet" pet food?). So apparently A&M is quite cozy with Hill's, and therefore they gave him a whole hour to blabber to us. He showed us some propaganda on why the founder of Hill's is a saint and hero and about the beginning of Hill's. More puzzling was the second video, which was about a photographer for National Geographic. It had nothing to do about vet med directly; it was about creativity. It was really boring and the narrator kept faking us out by pretending to start wrapping it up and then going off and repeating himself ten more times. Yikes.
• 12:00 - LUNCH! Woot! Paid for by...Hill's! It was enchiladas. I had cheese. This was after standing in a line for 40 minutes. I have no idea why this wasn't planned out better. I did get a free backpack, which is actually quite nice, and a nutrition textbook that I will apparently use in second year. We ate lunch with our faculty mentors.
• 1:15 - "Summer Veterinary Student Research Fellowship Programs" ... You can do this after your first or second year. It is a program intended to introduce research skills to students with no advanced science degree. It is also all summer long and I don't think I would want to give up my whole summer for it.
• 1:30 - DVM/MBA Program - you can get your DVM and MBA in five years. You either take a year off after your second year, using the 12 months plus a summer internship-type thing, to get your MBA, or you can do it in the 12 months following your 4 years of vet school. Um, no thank you. Great program, no interest here =P
• 1:45 - US Army talk. Basically selling us on applying for their really rare scholarships you can get after first year. What happens is they pay all your school costs, give you a month stipend of $1300+, make you a 2nd Lieutenant, and then you have to 1) serve a year of active duty for each year they paid your way and do 45 days of training stuff during the summer. But as I said, the few spots they have each year are highly sought after. And I don't think Matt wants me to join the Army :)
• 2:00 - Post-DVM Clinical Training - an A&M vet told us about internships and residencies and how to start preparing on day one to be able to get one, if you are interested in specializing. These are very competitive.
• 2:15 - Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital - I get 20% off on animal health care. Score.
• 2:30 - break :)
• 2:45 - Support services. Um...yeah.
• 3:00 - Survival Skills for Vet Students - this was a talk and Q&A with 5 4th year vet students. They talked about notes, reading the book, their hardest class, and stuff like that. Nothing too informative for me, but not boring either.
• The End

So... it was a busy day! I only saw one person in my class that I knew at all. It was a girl that started working in the organic labs a few weeks before I left. It is a little weird because she was two classes behind me, but that's what everyone is who went straight from undergrad to vet school. I was surprised I didn't recognize anyone else at all.

Emily picked me up and we had some errands to run. Well, I did. I had to go get my student ID (another line to wait in) and pick up my parking pass (line there too). And a trip to Albertsons to get prescriptions filled (no line, but the guy was insanely slow). Then we had time to go to the duplex for a snack before heading back to the vet school so I could pick up my $600+ in supplies and books. Emily is a saint. I also got to talk to a guy named Clint who I knew from my Animal Nutrition and Animal Science classes in fall of 2003. He went straight into vet school so he's a 3rd year now, and I knew he was around because he knows Uncle Johnny from their church. Quite the coincidence. Then I finally got to go home, eat dinner, and take my shoes off! Tomorrow is more of the same, but we get out earlier.

The cats are not doing well so far with each other. Nellie is pretty calm and usually only hisses in response to Piper...but Piper, well, she's not nice. She hisses preemptively any time she passes a room. She also has claimed the kitchen as hers and is often found sleeping under the dining table or on top of the cabinets above the fridge. Hopefully she'll simmer down soon. She really needs to chill a bit, because she's nervous even when Nellie is nowhere near her.

Matt comes tomorrow night. Yay :) That's the only thing that made me feel okay to let him leave on Wednesday. I thought "when I wake up on Thursday, I can say 'Matt comes tomorrow.'"

EDIT: I forgot a major part! My schedule. It may not be final, but this is what I have...

• Monday
• Lectures - anatomy (9-9:50), physiology (10-10:50), microbiology (11-11:50)
• Labs - histology (1-2:50), anatomy (3-4:50)
• Tuesday
• Lectures - histology (8-8:50), physiology (9-9:50)
• Labs - histology (1-2:50), clinical correlates (3-4:50) (this may not be a lab...)
• Wednesday (basically Monday +1)
• Lectures - professional development (8-8:50), anatomy (9-9:50), physiology (10-10:50), microbiology (11-11:50)
• Labs - histology (1-2:50), anatomy (3-4:50)
• Thursday (Tuesday +1)
• Lectures - histology (8-8:50), physiology (9-9:50)
• Labs -physiology (10-11:50), histology (1-2:50)
• Friday (awesome!)
• Lectures - physiology (10-10:50), microbiology (11-11:50)
• No labs generally, but my anatomy lab tests are scheduled for Friday afternoons