Diary of a Vet Student

Oh I really should be doing my statistics on this computer but I'm not. I'm writing this and making a kind of pathetic attempt to look like I am doing my statistics stuff so that I don't offend the semi-nice man teaching us. Actually he's got a lovely personality, but in my head he's linked with extreme misery and thus only partially nice. Anyway yup statistics is grim.

AVS last weekend was a little bit massive. The first night was in the Arches, which is a great Glasgow venue. Was so good to see everyone I'd left behind in Glasgow. Unfortunately had forgotten just how cold it is up there and so hadn't realised just how unsensible it would be to run around the streets in a skimpy brownie costume. I don't think I've ever met a more scary crazy group of people than the Dublin vets who seemed to be covered in mud the whole weekend and ready to rugby tackle anything that crossed their path, including me. My nice friend Elissa won an ipod mini for looking great in a giraffe outfit. Infact the neck was longer than her, but she's only 5 foot.

So AVS took about 3 days to recover from. This is because I am a bit weak and faint hearted when it comes to alcohol, unfortunately we had to do our project talks on the Thursday of last week. That was four days after ACS, but I still think that some aspects of my talk were a bit slurred. This was probably due to (I hope) lack of sleep that to alcohol residue. So I think the talk went ok overall and my nice supervisor had sent a departmental email which meant that everyone with any vague connectuion to chickens came to constructively criticise me and that really helped (but it was scary).

The weekend that's just been was the weekend of the soiree at Bristol. This is when everyone gets dressed up in black tie and has a big disco (confusing?). It was a really good actually, but things went rapidy down hill for me at the after party when I was forcefed a couple of weird looking pink shots. Enough said. All of that was counter balanced the next day when I went to devon with my wee sister to see my Grandma who fed me lots of yummy things and took me to a relaxing jazz night before feedning me some more lovely things.

Tonight is essay night - we're writing literature reviews for our projects. Lovely

Hello. The chicken situation is hotting-up a little now. Infact I'm feeling a tad concerned that I've got to prepare an introductory talk and a literature review essay within the next 3 weeks. The big problem is that it's AVS this weekend so I'll need a good week of vegging to recover from that and then I'm away the following weekend too.

AVS is this very large and extremely drunken outing for all 7 UK vet schools. It's held at a different place each year and this year it's at the best place it could possibly ever be at and that's bonny sunny Glasgee. I'm really excited and have scheduled an afternoon in town tomorrow after capoeira to buy a brownie outfit, which is the theme for Bristol. Of course I had a major moral dilemma about which vet school to support, but as everyone at Bristol have been so nice to me it's only right that I pay them back in some small way by donning my collottes and wee yellow jumper. Actually that's a slightly silly idea. I've tried to get into my flat mate's collottes (do you spell it like that?) and nearly sliced myself in 2, so perhaps a bit of improvisation is in order. I'm sure primark won't fail me.

The weekend was very good. It began with a trip into the deepest depths of the forest of Dean. This is where my chickens are. The people there are very nice and used to people like me coming along and doing behavioural studies on the hens. I got really badly lost on the way back, mainly due my innate stupidity and total lack of direction. The journey was so traumatic that I had to collapse on a bed and watch DVDs all night.

Saturday was a good work day. I tried to tackle a little bit more of the statistics stuff we're learning. It's still all a bit blurred though. Saturday night was a bonfire party, which was fun. My hardcore flatmates stayed up until 6am, but I was weedy and and went to bed at 4 after scraping handfuls of corned beef straight from the tin and into my mouth. Lovely.

Today we've had some feedback on the practise essays we did. They were all ok, but can be improved (hmmm...), but it's so good to find out where you're going wrong.

Ok, I think it's stopped raining outside now, so I'm going to make a run for it.

I'm in the library at the moment searching for journals about chickens. I think this will be happening quite a lot over the next few months. I'm also going to get quite passionate about chicken welfare thanks to my lovely dissertation project. I'm off to the Forest of Dean tomorrow, to see "my flock" for the first time. Apparently there are 12000 of the them and only 140 ever go outside, so hopefully by strategically planting a few trees I might be able to get a few more to come out. Of course I'm going to do lots of technical stuff as well, like behavioural observations. I might even be really lucky and get to use the thermal imaging camera to survey the birds for feather pecking.

I finnished lectures on tuesday this week, which kind of indicates that I should be doing some serious work. I am definitely trying, but somehow often end up in a nice country pub (last night)or at the cinema (tonight) or hung over (all of last weekend). Some serious knuckling down is definitely called for me thinks. We have our introductory talks coming up. That's when we've got to outline the need for our projects using relevant literature. We've also got an introductory essay coming up, which should review all the recent literature surrounding our projects.

Lectures have been really good over the past few weeks. We had a lecture on the poulry meat industry. It's really sad, not to mention gut -wrenching. Basically we eat a lot a lot of chicken and eggs in this country and we like to produce it pretty cheaply and there are all sorts of gruelling welfare concerns which spring from this. The lectures are really good at laying out the facts in a non-biased way and then it's up to us as vets to decided how we think about the problems and whether we can change them and how we can enforce the legislation.

Anyway. I've had a nice week. I spent last weekend in London with my Glasgow homies. Managed to spend excessive amounts of money in topshop and H and M, before blasting my liver in soho. And this week I've been avoiding work in a variety of different ways, including going to caporeira on wednesday, which was ace fun. This morning I managed to lose myself and my flatmates for an hour running along footpaths and away from cows in langford. Tonight I'm watching wallace and Gromit - attack of the warebunny or something?