Productivity...?

First week down and it's time to get serious!  It was super-difficult to get motivated to study much in the past week - we just started, had a few snow delays, not much coming up exam-wise, boy was here this weekend, etc.  Plenty of excuses and justifications for that.  Now that the first week is over, I think it's high time to get started with the hard-core studying routine.

So far classes are going great - no major duds or anything thus far!

Physiology - LOVING it!  We're doing cardiac physio to start the semester, and I'm actually really liking it so far.  The notes are clear and really interesting, so it's the perfect way to start the day at 8 am.

Anatomy - Now that we're in large animal/comparative anatomy, the labs are definitely a LOT messier!  We're doing dissections on a calf, pony, and goat in each group and are using pig pro-sections for additional comparison.  We are FLYING through material, too.  A lot of it sounds at least familiar or similar to last semester but there are also a lot of changes.  Not quite sure how to think about or approach the exams yet, so we'll see how this one goes.  But the lectures and textbook are very entertaining thanks to the guy teaching!

Virology - Just had one lecture of this so far, and the professors seem really great and enthusiastic.  I don't know too much about viruses yet, so I'm excited to learn more.

Immunology - I had a pretty in-depth course in undergrad, so this seems like cake right now.  I'm actually really thankful I have a background in what we're doing in the course, because they're flying really quickly through the material.  Our labs are going to consist of small group case discussions which will hopefully give some good practical skills to go along with the book learning.

Embryology - Also a new subject to me, but it seems very straight-forward and the teacher is very sweet.  Only have this one once a week, so I doubt it'll be too intensive.

Behavior - Eh.  Seems pretty basic and simple so far (even though it's not really my cup of tea), but we do have to complete an animal training project.  And since I have no animals here to speak of I'll need to attach myself to a friend and their dog to finish it.

Production Medicine - More of the same from last semester.  We get an additional lab with each of the major large/food animal species, and it seems like this semester has a slight focus on nutrition for each species.

And that's it!  It's been great to get back into a routine and see my classmates after a long hiatus.  Winter break was definitely super-long now that I think about it, and I'm ready to start the learning process again.  I've also managed to get a lot of my summer research project squared away - I'll (hopefully) be studying epithelial to mesenchymal cell transition in pulmonary tissue.  That's a change that occurs frequently in fibrosis disease patterns, and there's a new gene of interest that controls a lot of this process that is actually considered a cancer gene.  Should be interesting!