As predicted, yesterday was a snow day. I slept in late and was generally lazy, but got some productivity in there by working on my lab animal assignment (a paper about a specific animal model of a selected disease) and by reading over some documents in preparation for my very first animal care committee meeting today.

An animal care committee is a group of people from an institution who come together regularly and review the research being done at that particular institution. Researchers submit their protocols - documents with details on everything from how the study will be performed to what kind of animal will be used - for review and receive comments back from the ACC on improvements that can be made before it is finally approved by the committee.

I have been the student representative to the committee (as an alternate last year and as the actual representative this year) but due to conflicts with class schedule have never gotten to attend one! I was so excited about getting to go today, but also nervous because I didn't know exactly what to expect. Fortunately my default mode when nervous about an event is to prepare as much as I possibly can. So I read through all of the documentation provided for us, packed my bag with my iPad so I could bring up the documents during the meeting, a notepad and some pens to take notes if needed.

The meeting was a great experience in a lot of ways. I got to see how the campus attending veterinarian interacted with other committee members, what is expected of the veterinarian at the meeting (he talked more than anyone there), what kind of concerns everyone else had (which were pretty much all the same little things I had thought of while reviewing, which was validating) and just how the system worked in general. My work with AAALAC stuff over the summer was a nice thing to have under my belt, as I was familiar with the idea of protocols and what kinds of things committees were concerned about. Overall a really neat experience and one I look forward to repeating! It just further cemented my excitement for my future in lab animal medicine :)