Kestrel Boxes, or Why I Continue To Choose Experience: A First Year Story

Nikki Becich - Tufts

V:50 I:4 Experiences Honorable Mention

Everyone’s been there.

You’re stressed out on a regular Thursday afternoon. You have exactly 217 textbook pages you’d like to review before you even -look- at the end-chapter review questions you KNOW are going to be on the written part of the exam. You haven’t slept much because you’re on call for Large or Small animal tech team, or you got up early for baby care team at the Wildlife Clinic, and you went to those dinner talks and learned about Veterinarians in the Army, got your VBMA credits, and now you’re here. The exam is tomorrow. Your undergraduate A-complex conscience is chewing you out for your irresponsible behavior and irreverence of the educational system you’re paying for the privilege of being a part of…

And you get an email.

The State Ornithologist is on campus, and we know you love birds! Would you have time to walk campus with him while he stakes out the best location to place Kestrel nest boxes…for an hour or two? Just an hour or two.

You may not have pulled that A, or even that B, in this class’s last exam. You could get through a decent amount of material in these next few hours. You aren’t struggling with the material, though. Your grades are fine. Not exceptional, but fine. What do you say?

For my first year of vet school, that answer has been a (sometimes reluctant, sometimes resounding) “Definitely.” Every time. It’s true, what some professors say. “C=DVM, you just need to pass,” (yeah yeah, thanks for the reassurance, Ms. I-got-all-my-top-internships-and-residency-choices Professor). They mean it though, and so far, I think it’s really true. Looking back over my first year, determining when to elect the experience over the extra studying effort has made my entire veterinary education so much more than just the facts. It’s affirmed a more comprehensive, more inspiring kind of veterinary medicine as my lifestyle. I’m grateful for every minute of it.

Because-

At what other point in your life will you get to vaccinate wooly lambs on the last days of winter, visit a zoo clinic to talk about sloth enrichment and lemur diabetes, feed and examine baby squirrels on your own campus, and end up slap-happy over a dissected horse leg with five of your intoxicatingly intelligent peers, studying anatomy until the Saturday night watchman comes in around midnight and tells you to carry on with your “party”—within the space of 48 small hours?

Small hours? Did I say “small” hours? Hardly! I can barely comprehend how much each and every one of us, as vet students, attempt to cram into each and every single day on these vet school campuses across the USA, and the world. When I “failed foster” and adopted my half-blind bearded dragon, my friend from Western Veterinary School in California was online giving me ALL of the advice. My classmates are volunteering in the feral cat clinic for eight-hour days, they’re out learning artificial insemination techniques and taking the most ridiculous pictures, the weekends before our biggest exams. They are the ones organizing international faculty mixers so we can get out of the classroom and into the tales of our professor’s creative and unique experiences, and through them, better dream of where our own paths could take us. In the same way that travel broadens the mind, an afternoon out of the classroom, and a weekend spent putting studying second have broadened what veterinary medicine means to me.

So.

When the Cornell Special Species Symposium is the weekend in between your third-to-last Large Animal Anatomy practical and your Immunology final, and you’re passing your classes just fine, what do you choose? If you can afford to, do it! Study as much as you can to get through the tests, and meet other vet students who are sacrificing a study weekend to tour the world-reknown Lab of Ornithology. Talk to new vets and professors about their careers, and how many research assistants they need for the summer. You’ll network, you’ll enjoy yourself, and most importantly you’ll be reminded of why you’re putting yourself through the stress of vet school in the first place. You may be surprised how constantly renewing your enthusiasm may actually boost those grades you try to not let control you, and how the people you meet along the way will shape your thoughts and path more than a note on a report ever could.

You may even get to castrate an Alpaca or two along the way. (Thanks, Cornell.)