Thursday, August 30, 2012

First Post!

You are currently viewing the beginnings of my blog as a VET STUDENT! Yes, a vet student. That will be me in less than a month (September 24th, to be exact). I'm starting this blog in order to keep track of my time as a student, and I also plan on sharing it with family and friends if they're interested.

So, how did I become a vet student you ask? Aside from my personal goals and aspirations that have built up over a lifetime, basically it's been a lot of hard work!

I got my bachelor's degree in Natural Resource Ecology and Management, with the Wildlife Biology option, from Oklahoma State University. During the fall semester of my senior year, I filled out an application with VMCAS - short for Veterinary Medical College Application Service. The application was huge and took me hours over the course of several days to finish, no thanks to my procrastination. 

Obviously for the VMCAS application I had to fill out basic information like who I was and where I went to school, but it also got pretty in depth. I had to input every single class I've taken in college (very tedious), all of my animal experience including hours, description, and whether it was with a vet or not, and every club and activity I've been involved in. I also had to provide three letters of recommendation (at least one from a vet), my GRE scores (I took the GRE the previous summer), and finally, my personal statement. There's a reason it's called a personal statement, in that it should be about you and you alone. However, making your personal statement stand out from the crowd is a completely different story. It's great that you've loved animals your whole life, you've always had a pet, so on and so forth, but so has every other person interested in becoming a veterinarian. In my opinion, this is where getting a variety of experience before applying can be incredibly helpful. Rather than having a cookie cutter personal statement, I was able to write about my time in Thailand working with elephants and how it affected me. I was able to talk about the first time I felt the gratification of successfully using my problem-solving skills and intuition to help an animal in need.  Having great and interesting experiences helped me write a great and interesting personal statement.  Finally, after completing the VMCAS application, filling out a supplementary application for each school, and paying an exorbitant amount of fees for it all, I had applied.  

Now all I had to do was sit back and wait for schools to contact me for an interview.  I had chosen to apply for Oklahoma State, my state school and alma mater, Mizzou, which was only a state away and offers in-state tuition after the first year, and Oregon State, which is in the beautiful state of Oregon where my aunt and uncle also happen to live.  Mizzou contacted me first, in  November, asking for an interview.  Derek and I drove all the way to Columbia and back in early January for that interview.  I have to say that the University of Missouri is a beautiful school, with the most gorgeous campus I've seen.  I thought I did okay at the interview, and I was more nervous than anything.  I tend to second-guess myself so I don't really have a good idea of how well I actually did.  Only a few days after my interview with Mizzou, I got an email from Oregon State saying that I'd been accepted!  They don't interview out-of-state (OOS) students (thankfully for me), but it was a bit of a shock to get the email so early in the year.  I was beyond ecstatic!  I initially applied for Oregon State on mostly a whim, especially since they accept so few OOS students.  Less than a month after that I heard from Mizzou, also getting great news about being accepted.  Two down, one to go!  The day after I heard from Mizzou, I received an interview invite from Oklahoma State, which took place in February.  This interview I felt like I absolutely bombed.  When I get nervous or I'm in an uncomfortable situation, I tend to have a chronic case of word vomit.  That definitely took place during this interview.  I don't want to go into details (I'm still embarrassed thinking about it), but after that interview I didn't think I was going to get into my own state school, of all places!  My mom and Derek both assured me that I was fine, but I can't say I wasn't surprised and relieved when I received my third acceptance letter from Oklahoma State later that month!  It just goes to show that, even if you think you completely ruined something, there's still a chance that you can pull through and be successful.  Or something like that, haha.

After all the stress of filling out paperwork, going to interviews, and waiting for answers, the truly hard part had arrived: deciding which school to choose.  Oklahoma State was close to family and friends and everything I was familiar with.  I'd interned at the vet school, so I knew the layout, I knew where everything was in Stillwater and I could easily find a place to live, and I just loved OSU.  Not to mention, relatively cheap (for vet school) in-state tuition.  On the other hand, Derek and I were ready for a change, and an adventure.  We were a little TOO familiar with Stillwater.  Living in a small town for four years is rough, but living there for eight years was a little hard to think about.  Despite the fact that we'd made many friends at OSU, most of them were about to move on and start their own lives elsewhere, and we would be the last ones left.  Mizzou had its own pros and cons as well.  A cool new city for us to explore and be independent in, but still close enough to home that we could go for a weekend if we wanted.  Seemingly newer nicer vet school facilities than Oklahoma State had to offer.  In-state tuition after my first year.  But, the landscape still looked like Oklahoma, and the town was still small, so we might as well be in Stillwater.  I wasn't sure if the curriculum was going to cater to my interests as well.  I had only really applied to Mizzou in case I didn't get accepted into Oklahoma, so I wasn't sure I'd rather go there.  Lastly, Oregon State, where I had applied to on a whim.  I'd been to Oregon before, and I fell head-over-heels in love.  The state, the landscape, the people, the attitude - I love them all.  Oregon would certainly cater to our more adventurous appetites.  The west coast is known for its affluence of tech jobs, which would be perfect for Derek.  The vet school was relatively new, with nice new facilities.  And something that really appealed to me: the small class size.  With only 57 students, I'd have less people to meet, get to know people better, and get more attention from my professors, when compared to the class sizes of 82 for the other OSU and 120 for Mizzou.  Not to mention the focus that Oregon State University has on natural resources and the environment, a field which I'd gotten my undergraduate degree in (and didn't want to go to waste!).  The only big hurdles for Oregon State were the cost (out of state tuition ain't cheap) and living half a country away from nearly everyone I know, which are pretty big things to overcome.  

Deciding on a school was in no way easy.  It took Derek and me months of putting it off, having tiny conversations about it, and throwing ideas back and forth before we finally came to a decision.  No matter how wrong it seemed, Oregon State University felt so right.  We were in denial about it at first; we tried to make a practical decision, but ultimately we failed.  I'd never even planned on applying anywhere other than OK State; had it not been for my clever Uncle Jim teasing me about attending Oregon State two years prior and planting the idea into my brain, I probably wouldn't have applied elsewhere at all.  But his teasing, mostly to annoy my mom, made me start to think that maybe I could live elsewhere.  Maybe I didn't have to attend Oklahoma State for vet school (which I'd been proudly saying I'd do for the past 5 or more years).  Derek and I could experience a new place, meet new people, try new things.  It might not have been the most practical thing we'd ever decided on, and it was going to be hard as hell to tell our family members and friends that we were moving away from them, but it was our choice and we made it.  

And here we are!  In Oregon!  We've been living here for a little more than two months now.  After a long, three-day drive with Derek, Moosh (my chinchilla) and me in the U-Haul, and Derek's parents and our three dogs in the car, we arrived and began moving into our apartment.  Derek started his new job a week or two after that, and he loves it!  In the meantime, I've been enjoying my last summer before vet school starts.  I miss having Derek at home with me during the day, but I've been making the most of it by relaxing and playing games (certainly not doing housework).  School starts in a little less than a month, and while I am incredibly nervous, I'm also getting more antsy to start every day.  Bring it on!

I'm going to go ahead and stop writing for now (WOW it is five in the morning), and go to sleep.  Next time I plan on writing about what I've done so far to prepare for vet school and what's left to do before school starts!  Thank you for reading!  :)

P.S. I should mention that I don't own this background.  I found it on wallbase.cc, and I couldn't find the source.  If you own it, and want me to take it down, please let me know.  Thank you!


6 comments:

  1. Even though I am sad! At least there is Skype! :D I miss you guys!

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  2. We miss you too! I'm very happy we live in an era where it's so easy to keep in touch with people who are far away. If this was happening twenty years ago, I don't think I could have moved like this!

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  3. Happy to have you here, & I'm excited to be part of your new adventure! You'll do great, and we're all so proud of you.

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  4. Thank you Aunt Steph! Derek and I are both soooo excited to be in Oregon. Also, next time we go to the store we're getting ingredients for rigatoni, so you and Uncle Jim can come have dinner with us!

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  6. It is something a full of your first experience that how you made able to yourself to write after completing your bachelor's program, also your application contain much of the interesting guidelines which are actually needs to be. personal statement vet school

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