Them's my reasons and I'm sticking to them.

Blissed out cat

Because I am a sensible growed-up type of person and I value my career prospects I decided to set off for my first rotations as sleep deprived and unprepared as possible (I woke up this morning after about 4 hours kip and too much dancing next to a totally blissed out cat). It seems to be important for a vet to be able to operate on very little sleep and I felt the need to develop this skill. Them's my reasons and I'm sticking to them. Tomorrow morning at 6am I will reflect upon the decisions I made this week and probably wonder if my reasoning was sound, but that's what hindsight is there for. Week 1 is equine so I figure so intensive anatomy swotting during the vet's morning meeting might be a good plan. Fingers, paws, hooves etc. crossed.

T-minus two days until they let me loose

Cripes, where have the weeks gone? It dawned on me, whilst packing my worldly possessions into my van, that from Monday onward I am a vet. Granted, I will be a vet-in-training, but still a real-life vet. I hope that the first few weeks are gentle and give me a little chance to find my feet again. It's more than a little daunting to be released into the veterinary profession after so many years of lecturing on campus and watching from the sidelines. As my lovely flatmates helped me carry my stuff downstairs after our enchilada feast I felt a little fearful. It will pass. My new life as a veterinary rotations student is about to begin and I need to give myself over to that for a while and concentrate.

On a slight tangent, it seems prudent to remind myself and anyone else who happens to read that Rule #1 of the Royal Veterinary College is don't date anyone at the College. I hate being right sometimes.

On a complete tangent, my Macmillan Cancer Support vest is here (at home) and I am quite excited about going out for a run in it tomorrow. Let's keep the fingers crossed for blue sky and sunshine. I'm running the London Triathlon for Macmillan Cancer Support this year and you can sponsor me (if you so wish) by visiting www.justgiving.com/Hannah-Louise-Jordan.

Student Union

At work again this week because I'm scheduled for introduction to equine rotations track next week. The feedback from the others seems fairly positive. I'm not complaining one little bit; interval training my way back into using my brain suits me just fine.

Last night we had the first Hawkshead SU council meeting. There are many things discussed at these meetings, some are trivial, some are fascinating, some are dull and some controversial. Funnily enough, the latter usually centers around money. The main thing I take away from these meetings (aside from a list of action points) is a real sense of community and a love for the RVC as an institution. I often hear muttered grumbles about the SU and the decisions they make on behalf of the student body; much like national political parties, I really feel you can't complain unless you are involved and giving feedback. We can only represent you if you tell us what you think, so please do tell us what you think!

Whirlwind tour of clinical presentations

The last two days have been pretty packed with lectures and case work. We have skipped through vomiting, diarrhoea, weight loss, epistaxis, pale mucous membranes, jaundice, haematuria, coughing and dyspnoea, weakness-syncope-seizures and last, but not least, PU/PD. This whirlwind tour has been designed to get us thinking again after the Christmas break and aims to get us to consider possible clinical presentations and how we can use the clues from a history, presentation and clinical exam to work logically through cases to achieve a diagnosis. The concept is simple and the feedback from clinicians teaching current final years is that these students are measurably better at clinical problem solving. There is only one problem: I am absolutely terrible at it! Incidentally, the logical approach to clinical problem solving also runs as a CPD course (http://cpd.rvc.ac.uk) and I would recommend it very highly.

Learning about Endnote

I am sat in a computer aided learning (CAL) session which is designed to teach RVC 4th year students how to use Endnote software. The session so far has been informative and a good refresher on just how fabulous Endnote is when you are writing academic reports or essays. However, the delivery was a little muddled and on more than one occasion I found my mind wandering to other things. To be perfectly honest, I think this is more of a failing on my part than it is on part of the instructor who has tried very hard to get the key points across.

Lots of the yeargroup haven't bothered to come to any of these self-help research sessions. When they reach their research rotations block there will be much wailing, moaning and ganshing of teeth about how little help has been provided to them with their project. Once again this will be a case of the help being there and the students failing to take advantage of it, but perhaps that is just the view of a jaded graduate student who doesn't turn down free help with anything anymore. That was a valuable lesson learned on the last degree.

Whether the failing is on the part of the student for not attending, or on the part of the college for not pitching these sessions quite right (too slow and boring or too quick and impossible to follow... it needs to be just right like baby bear's porridge) there is a tangible improvement from the first sessions of these sort I attended. Improvement is not to be sniffed at and I hope that the RVC continues to listen to student feedback and make more positive changes. I feel like this is leading me onto a fairly serious rant about increasing student numbers, class sizes and the detrimental effects this has on small group learning, but I will save that for another time.

The great Moodle migration.

The college is making the move from the Blackboard learning environment to Moodle this year. The whole process is pretty arduous because resistance to change is always rife amongst the staff and students; it is easier for most people to follow the path of least resistance and a migration to Moodle doesn't fall under that category. 

The RVC is right at the forefront when it comes to developing online learning materials. Most of our lectures are recorded with Echo 360 software which allows students to review both the accompanying power point and audio lecture at home. In addition to this there are online multiple choice questions to test yourself and numerous computer aided learning (CAL) programs to accompany specific material. These are designed to encourage students to go hunting around a subject and increase their breadth of knowledge. These have evolved over my six years at the RVC and get better and better as more students feed back to the staff; the CAL materials aren't universally loved though and many students would prefer all the material to be lectured in a more spoon-fed format. Whatever course you are interested in, I can't emphasise enough the importance of considering the programme structure and methods of teaching when you are choosing your university. If the teaching methods don't suit your individual needs you're fighting an uphill battle from the start.

Anyhow, I digress. The task of migrating the material has already begun and I am joining the effort. I need to start wrangling with Respondus to get the job done; I'd rather wrangle with Dreamweaver any day and that's really saying something. 

This just about sums today up.

Say hello!

I haven't really been able to get myself into any rotations notes yet because we are still not started back. I'm trying to distract myself with work in the meantime before any hint of boredom sets in. If you happen to drop by the blog please introduce yourself and say hello; I don't bite, honest!

I currently have a student from France staying with me and she is taking a rotation in the Queen Mother Hospital for Animals over the Christmas holidays with the oncology unit. Today she had a few consults with a lymphoma patient and she has seen several dogs receiving chemotherapy for mast cell tumours. She really enjoys the research side of veterinary work and is considering pursuing a masters in her last year of the course. I think that's really nifty. In England there isn't much love amongst the students for those choosing to pursue a career in research; it seems to me that this is largely due to the fierce competition for places and that research is seen as 'taking a place from someone who really wanted to be a vet'. It's sad, but true, that most of the people who make this argument are only doing so to convince themselves that they still really want to be a vet. A large proportion of my colleagues definitely did not arrive here to be a vet; it is more that this is where they ended up and now they have to make the best of a bad situation.

I would very much like to work for some time in France and having Emilie with me has meant my out of practice French took a bit of a bashing last night. However, it is only by practice you can improve so once more into the breach I stroll...