Connie's starting a blog! We'll see if it lasts...

So, there have been several times throughout my life when I have attempted to keep a journal or a diary of some sort. These attempts went very well...for about a week. I think one of the main problems had to do with my slight perfectionist tendencies, which caused me to feel like a failure at journaling if I didn't write in it every single day or if I didn't include every little detail of what was going on in my life. Therefore, I quickly became overwhelmed and gave up. However, this is different! This is a blog! Which is nothing like a journal whatsoever... Anyway, my hope is that the fact that someone might actually read this will keep my entries from being unmanageably verbose and will force me to update it, at least occasionally.

Now that I think about it, I'm a little sad that I didn't start this at the beginning of the semester. It may have been interesting to chronicle the adventure that is the beginning of veterinary school before all the weird stuff that we do started to become a little more routine. However, we continue to do weird stuff, so perhaps it will still seem so to anyone who reads this.

What I don't want is for this to become is a place where I complain about my many hours spent at school, studying, tests, professors, formaldehyde, or anything else that might warrant complaining. If you know me, I probably already subject you to enough of this, and I'm really sorry. I really don't want to, but sometimes I just get overwhelmed and it's all I'm thinking about the majority of the time, so it unfortunately slips over onto people who definitely don't deserve to have to listen to me complain. But, hopefully this blog will stay relatively stress and complaining free. If I stray off course, feel free to give me the internet equivalent of a slap in the face and tell me to focus!

What I do want is to share with people some of the interesting little occurrences going on in my life. I've been able to do and learn so much in the past couple months, so if I can save a little piece of the coming months for myself and others, I think this will definitely be worth it.

So, to start, my interesting observation for today. Today, I believe, was our very first lecture in vet school that did not involve a powerpoint, overhead projector, or preprinted notes. The professor stood up in front of the classroom, talked about immunology, and drew the occasional schematic on the white board. I had to actually write out notes (gasp!), instead of filling in little additions to a set of preprinted notes, or on a powerpoint. It was amazing. The professor did not speed along, flipping through powerpoint slides like the survival of all domestic animals depends on it. He just talked, explained, summarized, reiterated important points, and drew out nice, simple diagrams. It's the most I've learned in an immunology class all semester. So, old school lecturing, when done correctly, can be a wonderful thing. I'm sure that the same can be said for more modern powerpoint lecturing, but it seems that so many professors use it so that we can get through as much material as quickly as possible. I suppose this is one of the points of vet school, but I still think it's kind of a shame.

So ends my first blog post. Hopefully there will be more!