Major traffic on this blog the last few days. Not sure why it's spiked all of a sudden, unless more pre-vets are scoping out SDN in preparation for applying to vet school this cycle or something. Although applications opened at the beginning of June...? Ah, the mystery of the internet.

Speaking of pre-vets, I volunteered to talk to some at our university about fourth year. I'm not really sure what I'd ask a fourth year student if I had it to do over, though. In preparation for this event and to hopefully persuade any of the current influx of lurkers curious about vet school, I've decided to make a real post about being a fourth year student.

So what's fourth year like?

Well, it depends. All schools that I'm aware of have rotations, where you go through different services (for example: internal medicine, surgery, anesthesia, radiology, etc) for a set period of time (one week to four weeks seems to be the maximum per rotation). Rotations are kind of like working: you come in, you do your thang, you go home (sometimes with homework).

As an example, I'm on anesthesia right now. I get my case assignment either the night before or the morning of. I "work up" the case: I read the animal's history and try to talk to the clinician on the case, I do a physical exam, I read the blood work and I decide what drugs I want to give the patient. We have rounds every morning where we discuss all of these things with the head anesthesia clinician. Eventually I get my patient, give it pre-meds, place an IV catheter, induce the patient with more drugs, place an endotracheal tube and start the anesthesia. I monitor the animal and record values like heart rate, blood pressure, etc throughout the entire time the animal is anesthetized. Then I wake the animal up, make sure it's comfortable and go about my merry way.

My day would be really different if I were on large animal medicine, or radiology or whatever. The day to day stuff really depends on what rotation you're on. The basic gist is assignment of patient, diagnostic tests and interpretation of those tests, plan for that patient based on all of the information you have.

A question I get frequently is, "How do you like fourth year?" I do like it. It's a lot better than the first three years in that you aren't sitting on one place all day listening to people read off of powerpoints. You're in the clinic, hands-on and learning pretty much constantly. You get to build awesome relationships with your peers, even those who may not have been your closest friend during the classroom years. You get to interact with some great veterinarians (your future colleagues) that have so much knowledge and are eager to teach you. You get to interact with some wonderful clients who not only care about their pet very much but are also so gracious toward you as a student. Sure, not everyone is such a saint to be around but I've found that the good ones far outweigh the bad.

I guess the best thing about fourth year so far, aside from the amazing people and the huge amount of learning, is that I've been completely validated in my decision to become a veterinarian. I've been headed toward lab animal medicine from Day One of vet school, but it's such a good feeling to be doing "regular vet" things and still very much enjoying that aspect of the field even though it isn't what I plan to do. If I ever had to leave lab animal, I would absolutely put my degree to good use somewhere else in the field of vet med. And knowing that I've put so much time, effort, money and emotion into this career, it's good to know that I chose right.