Diary of a Vet Student

I'm feeling really good today, because I just finnished my 3000 word essay of hell. Actually it wasn't really hell, but I haven't written many essays like that. We had to critically review 5 journals and 2 reviews which were all about whether or not animals can count. the answer is yes they can, but in a variety of comples weird ways, which are all very difficult to explain. The essay doesn't count towards my final degree mark, it was really a practise essay because now I've got to do another review essay about all the recent literature to do with my dissertation project. The nice thing is that we're having a feedback session. At vet school you don't really get much feedback unless you go and ask for it and that involves being a bit too organised for me. There's olnly 8 on my course here though, and thta's a lot easier to feed-back to than 100, like at glasgow.

Lectures this week were a bit uggish, because we had 3 rounds of statistics. At the moment statistics is going way over my head. I tend to just sit in the lectures sucking my tongue and looking a bit gormless . This is so unlike me as I'm normally really clever. All the other lectures have been pretty interesting. We had a lecture on welfare in the meat industry. Sounds a bit dry, but it was quite shocking because they taught us all about the legislatislation surrounding animal transport to slaughter and loads of other stuff you probably wouldnee get round to learning on the vets course. Most animals travel for up to 8 hours without a break. Hmm not nice. Infact my flatmate is turning vegan as a result of some of the things we're learning, although I must have a heart of steel as I'm still a meat eater, although I'm trying to buy better welfare meat, although this is really difficult.

Anyway, I had a chat with my supervisor this morning. We were planning my project which is all about whether you can encourage range useage by planting trees in free range chicken fields. now I'm just going to do some more journal reading on that.

I've taken up this martial art/brazilian dance thing called capoeira. It's awesome. At the moment i look like a bafoon when I try to do it, but the "blue belts" can walk on their hands and stuff so i'm going to keep doing it as i've always fancied being able to walk on my hands.

Went to the comedy club in Bristol on Wednesday, which was really good. One of the comedians is supposed to be coming here at 11.10 to rectal a cow, so i might go and watch.

I'm off to London today for a large weekend. It's my Bonny scottish friend's 21st. i've got to make a mad hatter outfit first though (she's called alice). Bye

Now that our "fresher's week" is over reality has it and we got our first essay today. I haven't really said much about what I'm actually studying. We are doing three kind of modules. One is behaviour - this covers everything things like how animals learn and how they can be trained to how animals behave towards each other socially when in the wild. We're also studying welfare - laws and regulations, lots of debates and discussions about what welfare is and when it needs to be enforced. The third module is statistics and this is to help us when we need to work with the data we get from our research projects. There are 8 people on the course and so it's really different to what I'm used to on the vet course. You can't go to sleep in lectures for a start - I've mulled this over and come to the conclusion that this would be well out of order when the tutor is only 6 feet away from you and there are only 7 others in there with you. Also we don't really have lectures anymore. It's more like being at school and being taught in a class and we get to talk about the concepts and ideas (or in the case of statistics, ask what the topic is - I frequently do this half way throught the lesson). I only have 3 days of lectures (all starting at 10am (how jammy is that?). Then on Thursday and Friday everyone is supposed to work on their dissertation projects.

We've just chosen our projets from a selection of 14 possible options. I'm doing mine on free range hens and trying to work out if they prefer being in woodland areas or they prefer open spaces. I'm really excited about it actually, although i guess that warrants me the classification of "weird". It's just nice to be able to design my own project, which might help to improve welfare. I'm just hoping bird fly stays clear of the UK this winter.

So then, this essay. I realised today after about 3 hours that i am crap at using Athen databases to search for journals. So I've spent the whole day getting nowhere really. In a fit of desperation I decided to get some advice and now I've got some articles to read tonight. Phew. the essay is called "do animals use numbers". Actually they do and they can tell the time too! I've got to write a critical review of recent research into this area.

This week I started capoeira (it's like martial arts without touching although due to my total lack of balance and grace I did kick a few people in the head, but not too hard so it was ok). This weekend we're having 2 more fancy dres nights. Superheros and 80s. So I'm going to invest in a pair of shoulder pads.

Well I'm still alive, just. This week's been hairy. I've just started my intercalation year at Bristol. So I'm not back in Glasgow until next September now becuase I'm taking a year out to study welfare and behaviour. Third and fourth years at Bristol all live in this quaint little place called Langford. It's a really cute little village , but it's also the sort of place I thought I might retire in one day, so you can imagine my despair when I arrived here after 5 hours in my clapped-out old fiesta on Saturday night.

But it's all ok, because there are 200 other vets students here and it turns out they too were a little panicked by the thought of being so far from civilization and so started organising house parties in a kind of mad frenzy. So after a late one on saturday I got up on Sunday, with my new found vet friends, to have my initiation. Oh how I laughed when they rubbed cow shit in my hair and made me drink cider beneath the crotch of a guy wearing a thong.

I'm living on site with four other intercalators and a load of other random people in the vet school hostel, which is like being in halls again so it's fantastic. It also means you can pool together your fancy dress resources which meant we were able to scrape together a few costumes for the 1st year pub crawl on Tuesday. I was an aerobics instructor, because I had lots of brightly coloured nickers and my friend had a pair of flourescent tights. Wednesday night was pub quiz and last night was bowling and tonight is chav night, so you see village life really is good fun. Who'd have thought it, well I never.

Anyway the course is really interesting. Infact I'm just about to go and have a chat with my Mum, who is ringing at 12 to help me make a decision about which dissertation project I want to do (don't laugh).