Today marks the beginning of Spring Break!
I'm heading off on a cruise, so the posting will start back up next week.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Club Lectures
One of the coolest things about vet school is the extra-curricular activities. I really love going to the lunch and dinner meetings hosted by various clubs. Mostly I’m in clubs that apply directly to my interests (AAFP for cats, LAM for lab animals, ACVIM for internal medicine), but I enjoy going to meetings when other clubs host meeting that they invite everyone to.
Tonight’s meeting was hosted by SFT (The Society for Theriogenology) and the speaker was the guy who does artificial insemination for Sea World. The lecture has been awesome.
The procedures they do are so cool. There are neat pictures of dolphins and baby dolphins and orcas and baby orcas. (Baby marine mammals are so cute!) The speaker is hilarious! (Or, maybe, it’s so funny because even vet students aren’t immune to the reflexive giggle when somebody says “penis.”)
My favorite quote of the evening: “The last killer whale I got pregnant…… Never mind. Moving on…”
Tonight’s meeting was hosted by SFT (The Society for Theriogenology) and the speaker was the guy who does artificial insemination for Sea World. The lecture has been awesome.
The procedures they do are so cool. There are neat pictures of dolphins and baby dolphins and orcas and baby orcas. (Baby marine mammals are so cute!) The speaker is hilarious! (Or, maybe, it’s so funny because even vet students aren’t immune to the reflexive giggle when somebody says “penis.”)
My favorite quote of the evening: “The last killer whale I got pregnant…… Never mind. Moving on…”
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
After a long hiatus
Hello there, internet-world. I've been away a while! School got very time consuming (no surprises there, I'm sure!)
However, I'm back and intending to post at least 3 times a week from here on out!
Vet school gives me plenty to talk about.
However, I'm back and intending to post at least 3 times a week from here on out!
Vet school gives me plenty to talk about.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Pathology and Food Words
My pathology prof enjoys telling stories about Robert Vircow, apparent founder of pathology. One of his favorites is that Virchow was the son of a grocer... And he described lesions in terms he was familiar with.
So, for example, the lesion associated with TB had a center of caseous necrosis. "Caseous" is a fancy word for "cheese-like" and they always describe it as looking like dry cottage cheese.
Ready for lunch?
So, for example, the lesion associated with TB had a center of caseous necrosis. "Caseous" is a fancy word for "cheese-like" and they always describe it as looking like dry cottage cheese.
Ready for lunch?
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Veterinarians are NOT Engineers
Pharmacology today was definitely a demonstration of how differently engineers and other scientists think.
We had to do some pretty basic drug calculations before class this morning. (Things like if you have 50% dexamethasone solution and you want to make 450 mL of 2.5% dexamethasone solution, how many mL of stock solution would you have to add to your saline?) In class, we went over the answers to the questions. First, it took 45 minutes to do 3 simple problems, which was bad enough.
Second, it was just so... haphazard. She just rambled along on the board writing down numbers WITHOUT units. In engineering, that's a HUGE no-no. If you're going to make an error in your calculations (or find it easily once you do), it's often because you flubbed the units somewhere. You either didn't do the conversion factor right (multiplied by pounds/kilograms rather than dividing by kilograms/pounds or something) or you are using the wrong units somewhere (liters instead of milliliters or something) for example.
Even worse to my sensibilities, she kept calculating out intermediate quantities, which is introducing a completely unecessary level of rounding error into your problem. And while that's often not a big deal, it can make anywhere between a couple tenths to a couple orders of magnitude difference! And with some drugs, even a couple tenths of a gram/millilter/whatever can be devastating. Then she was going on and on about how sometimes you need to back correct for volume added affecting your final concentration (which can be a big problem. But if you're worried about that, how are you not worried about rounding error?!) I mean, basically, the more times you enter numbers into your calculator, the more wrong your answer is. That's the whole point of dimensional analysis! (Besides that it's an easy way to track units.)
Just... incredibly frustrating!
And then, we did a clicker question where she gave us all metric values... and wanted the answer in ounces. When we asked for the conversion factor from mL to oz, she refused to give it. Really? I mean, in practice we can google that if the pharmacy really insists on oz. And really, who does that?! Medicine happens in metric, folks. (Besides, if I want to convert units like that, google is an excellent tool. Go ahead, enter "209 mL in ounces" into google... It will tell you "209 mL = 7.06713074 US fluid ounces." Thanks, Google, old pal!)
We had to do some pretty basic drug calculations before class this morning. (Things like if you have 50% dexamethasone solution and you want to make 450 mL of 2.5% dexamethasone solution, how many mL of stock solution would you have to add to your saline?) In class, we went over the answers to the questions. First, it took 45 minutes to do 3 simple problems, which was bad enough.
Second, it was just so... haphazard. She just rambled along on the board writing down numbers WITHOUT units. In engineering, that's a HUGE no-no. If you're going to make an error in your calculations (or find it easily once you do), it's often because you flubbed the units somewhere. You either didn't do the conversion factor right (multiplied by pounds/kilograms rather than dividing by kilograms/pounds or something) or you are using the wrong units somewhere (liters instead of milliliters or something) for example.
Even worse to my sensibilities, she kept calculating out intermediate quantities, which is introducing a completely unecessary level of rounding error into your problem. And while that's often not a big deal, it can make anywhere between a couple tenths to a couple orders of magnitude difference! And with some drugs, even a couple tenths of a gram/millilter/whatever can be devastating. Then she was going on and on about how sometimes you need to back correct for volume added affecting your final concentration (which can be a big problem. But if you're worried about that, how are you not worried about rounding error?!) I mean, basically, the more times you enter numbers into your calculator, the more wrong your answer is. That's the whole point of dimensional analysis! (Besides that it's an easy way to track units.)
Just... incredibly frustrating!
And then, we did a clicker question where she gave us all metric values... and wanted the answer in ounces. When we asked for the conversion factor from mL to oz, she refused to give it. Really? I mean, in practice we can google that if the pharmacy really insists on oz. And really, who does that?! Medicine happens in metric, folks. (Besides, if I want to convert units like that, google is an excellent tool. Go ahead, enter "209 mL in ounces" into google... It will tell you "209 mL = 7.06713074 US fluid ounces." Thanks, Google, old pal!)
Monday, August 24, 2009
And so it begins...
The first day went really well, over all.
The classes, so far, seem like they'll be fine. A lot of out-of-class learning, though. The pharmacology professor even told us she doesn't plan to just teach us the information... we're going to spend the class time learning to apply information to new situations. Or something like that. I'm a little skeptical.
Parasitology should be ineresting in that I'm really interested in parasites. Pathology should be fun because it's a bunch of crazy, gross stuff. Pharmacology/Toxicology I'm not exicted about (though, Toxicology should be better because I like the professor, who was my faculty mentor)... it seems like a lot of busy work. Tomorrow, we'll have our first round of Nutrition, which could go either way.
The classes, so far, seem like they'll be fine. A lot of out-of-class learning, though. The pharmacology professor even told us she doesn't plan to just teach us the information... we're going to spend the class time learning to apply information to new situations. Or something like that. I'm a little skeptical.
Parasitology should be ineresting in that I'm really interested in parasites. Pathology should be fun because it's a bunch of crazy, gross stuff. Pharmacology/Toxicology I'm not exicted about (though, Toxicology should be better because I like the professor, who was my faculty mentor)... it seems like a lot of busy work. Tomorrow, we'll have our first round of Nutrition, which could go either way.
Friday, May 8, 2009
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