Hello everyone. I hope to make this a site where you can join me on my adventure. Although I haven’t been writing for you the past couple years, I have had nor the time nor the interesting stories to share throughout school. While I have loved the last few years – updates on what part was dissected in anatomy or what I did an autopsy on may not have been what you wanted to read. However, this upcoming year will be a huge adventure for me – not for the least of which because I will be travelling quite a bit for my final year!

Most veterinary schools have an 8-month final year program, which is mostly conducted in a “teaching hospital” – a large building attached to or part of the school. Each rotation is usually in a separate part of the building. Our school was the first of its kind in North America to try something different – a 12-month final year program, with rotations taking place at a variety of well-established veterinary clinics throughout Alberta and beyond. Both types of programs allow for ‘externships’ – these are rotations arranged independently by the student that go through an approval process so that they are counted for credit in lue of a school organized rotation. The reason for the 12-month program is due to the seasonal nature of veterinary work – equine clinics are busiest in the spring, there is pregnancy checking cows in the summer, calving in the early spring and small animal year round. This gives us a real taste for what a rural mixed veterinarian does – overnight emergencies and all.

My rotations will range from 2 weeks to 4 weeks in duration. Now, I can’t quite tell you yet where I will be – that gets decided this week! Our class gets to stay for multiple extra hours after school on two nights – using a draft-style selection process to ensure that everyone has a ‘fair’ chance at the popular selections. We also have two large exams on the same days.

The end of this semester will be on April 26th. Then my final year will begin a mere 10 days later – on May 6th. It will run until May 1st, 2020, in which case I will have a single month off before officially graduating. During my short in-between break before my rotations, I will be going to Mexico to do some veterinary work with an organization called Christian Veterinary Mission in partnership with the by-law veterinarian of the city I will be travelling to. If you would like to help support me, you can donate by clicking here.

If you don’t want to receive my email updates, just unsubscribe below. Hopefully that isn’t the case, so I will do my best to keep these posts interesting! Thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to writing more!