Sometimes moving forward involves...moving backward?

I just got back to the apartment from being in the anatomy lab for about 8 hours today. These pre-anatomy test weekends can sometimes feel like mini-marathons, except instead of running they involve looking at lots of severed animal heads in excruciating detail. However, as strange as it may seem, this is probably why anatomy has been my favorite class so far. With the studying being so hands-on, the time spent in the lab really does just fly by. Also, when you find that lymph node, or finally understand the course of that stupid nerve, it's a really rewarding feeling. So, while it's still overwhelming, it definitely beats spending all of your studying time staring at flash cards or highlighting pages of notes (although anatomy involves plenty of that too).

On a totally different subject, I've been thinking recently on something that several of us first years seem to have taken note of. This is the rather paradoxical fact that veterinary school seems to share a lot of similarities with elementary, middle, and high school. How can this be, you ask? Well, here are several of the best examples that I've come up with:

• At the beginning of the year we were all assigned lockers sitting in the hallways. While standing around and chatting at lockers isn't nearly as important of a social outlet in vet school as it was in high school, the whole procedure really brought me back. Like in high school, people still enjoy decorating their lockers. While picture of pets predominate, there are also plenty of pictures of spouses and children, a decided difference from the usual high school decor.
• The entire school has the same lunch period from 12-1. While we have considerably more freedom to do whatever we want during this time than I ever had in high school, having everyone gathering into the commons to eat has a very cafeteria-esque feel to it. Not only that, but the Doctors/Professors always sit together at the same big table...very reminiscent of the teacher's table in middle school. After four years of living off a dining plan, it's interesting to be bringing a lunchbox to school everyday again.
• The drama...ooooh, the drama. I have a very distinct memory from middle school from when I was in sixth grade or so of one of my friends telling a friend who was a year above us that our entire class was like "a big Soap Opera." We took ourselves so seriously...it was cute. Yet, here I am again. This is what happens when 91 people do everything together all the time. Thankfully, I have found relatively drama free friends, for which I am extremely thankful. This means I just get to watch most of the drama from afar, which is pretty much what I attempted to do in middle and high school as well.
• Show and Tell! Being vet students, we all love to talk about our pets and show them off as much as possible. Dogs are invited to pretty much every social event, and people never fail to accept said invitation. When our wonderful physiology professor said she'd like pictures of our pets to show for mini breaks during class, we all jumped on the opportunity. The best example of show and tell came during reptile lab last Friday, when everyone with reptiles was invited to bring in their pets. The reptiles were introduced, passed around, and appropriately oohed and ahhed over, not so very unlike the little treasures that we used to bring around to show off in elementary school.
• I have definitely not done this much coloring since middle school, and once again colored pencils have become a necessary item in my back pack each day. This is mostly for anatomy, where color coding pictures of muscles, nerves, bones, and the like has become an essential part of my study regime. We even have a textbook that is essentially a humongous anatomy coloring book with tons of black and white pictures which I can highlight, color, and scribble to my heart's content. True, coloring is a rather lax way of studying, but the colored diagrams really do help me study later. Best of all, it allows me to feel like I'm being productive when I really don't feel like doing anything more thought provoking.

Vet school is definitely a different environment from undergrad. I feel like I've somehow both gained some freedoms and grown as an adult, while losing a lot of freedoms, at least as far as my academic curriculum goes. I suppose that it's all a part of slowly narrowing in on what you want to do with your life. Thankfully, the more and more I learn, the more excited I get about this strange career I've chosen. There's a whole lot of cool stuff that vets can do. So, I think the stringency of the program here will definitely be worth it in the end.