The first semester is over at Mizzou, i love school but i was nice to be able to get back home and spend time with family again. I worked most of the break at Dardenne Animal Medical Center which i missed at school. I like working and seeing all the animals, helping with the casses.

It is a new semester, all three of my roommates from last semster have swtiched schools or transfered on campus. Two of my three new roommates are forgien exchange students from china who have only been in the U.S. for about 2 weeks. I have been able to show them around campus and try to explain some of our culture. My third roommate is from kirckwood and is part of the national guard.

As far as classes go this semster, i am taking courses that are required by the universtity than my major.  I am taking chem 3, philosophy, Political Science, Ag Econ macro, and Biology.  I am right now a biochem majoy but, i have been talking to other students that are on the path to be vets as well, and i have found out that in order to continue as a biochem majoy i would not be able to enter vet school in until after senior year, because it would take that long to fill my major and pre vet requirements . So next semster i have decided to switch my major to animal science. Mizzou has a special program that i can apply at the end of my junior year to vet school and if i get in they will wave my last years of criets and give me  my major. So the when i would graduate vet school i will have my DVM and a B.S. in animal science. Which would be the same major that my dad, Dr. Lucas has.

If any one has any questions about school or any thing feel free to ask. My email is rdogsvet@sbcglobal.net or you can email Dr. Lucas and he will give it to me.

Brady Commons also know as the Student Center

This is Conservation Auditorium where my chem lecture takes place. We fill this room with 500 students.

The large animal section of the teaching hospital.

Teaching Hospital

Where my Biochem hospital

Next week is finals and so far my grades are looking good. As far as finals go I have a fairly easy week. I only have one final that is truly a final in the fact that i covers all the material from the entire semester. That is my chemistry exam which will by far my hardest exam yet. The only good thing is that i have done fairly well on the other three exams in that class so the final exam does not as vital to my achieving an A. As far as my other finals they are just like normal exam.

I have had mentioned the last post I am currently a biochem Major. Due to the difficulty of trying to get the nessacery credits to apply for vet school and trying to fill my requirements for biochem it is very difficult to do in only 3 years (Ionly have 3 years because i want to apply for vet school no latter than juinor year). So i have decided after this semester i will be changing my major from biochem to animals science and a minor in biochem. This will allow me to take the courses that i need for vet school, and yet still take the courses that i wanted to take in biochem to help understand the processes in the bidy alittle deeper than i would be able to learn other wish.

Pre-vet club had a very intersesting guest speacker a couple weeks ago, a vet from the kansas city zoo, Dr. kirk Suedomyer. He had a wonderful presentation and he has a great since of humor and was able to build it in and make the presentation much more interesting. He told us of a normal day as a zoo vet, he described the vast variety that he can see in the couse of any day. The most interesting thing that he told us he did in more of a question form, and i would like to ask you one of those questions:

A women brings be a chicken in and asked me if its toes are normal, I look at one foot and it has eight toes. He then asked us….is that normal?

Now this is the greatest reply that any doctor who has no idea can give… he proceeded to tell us that he then looked at the other toe and it also had eight toes. He then told the women that for this chicken yes that is normal. He used this example to show us that in a zoo you can deal with many very exotic species and there are no textbooks for if it has the same number of toes on both feet and it is not hindered by this then yes it is normal.

After i left that lecture i was thinking about Dardenne, and i realized that we kinda have to do the same thing sometimes. such as if we get a dog in for surgery and run blood work, we notice that it may have one enzyme that is high. We check the blood work in a few weeks and the same value again. Then we check it in 6 months, the same value. Well then for that animal even though our machine says he is sick but he has no signs of illness then that value is normal for that dog.

We could say the same thing for the clinic cat Jackson, he is about 18 or so, but he has a lot more toes than a normal cat, but for him that is normal.

Mizzou

I am in my first year at the university of Missouri-Columbia. my major for right now is biochemistry with a minor in pre-vet.  my classes this semester seem to be much easier than i had expected them to be. I am taking Animal science, Biochemistry, English 1000, Ag Econ, and chemistry 2. i am very happy with my schedule this semester and i enjoy my class and over all i was lucky enough to get very good professors.

I do not live on campus, due to the record number of freshman this year i was placed in a off campus apartment. My apartment houses a total of four, we all have our own room and bathroom. We share a living room and full kitchen. The apartment is two miles from campus, so they gave us bus passes to get from and onto campus.

I am involved with the pre-vet club on campus in order to get to help my chances of making it into vet school. This club also allows me to meet some of the professors in vet school and see the teaching hospital.

During the first meeting i was able to meet the sponsoring staff member, is Dr. Bob Youngquest. Before i introduced myself my dad called and i asked him if he had known Dr. Youngquest while he was in vet school; it turns out that Dr. Youngquest was my dad’s genetics teacher while he was in school. So when i introduced myself after talking to my dad, i was curious if he remember my dad. It turns out that it took him  less than 5 seconds to remember, I am not sure if that is good or not but he does remember him. I also found out talking to him that he is now on the board of admissions at the school of veterinary medicine.

Then during anther meeting we were given tours of the teaching hospital which i was very excited about, I had never been in there and was curious after hearing so much about it. As far as the small animal section the hospital was not that much different than Dardenne they just have more of every thing.

The last thing that the pre-vet club has given me the opportunity to do was community service. I was able to go to a local farm/ rescue and rehabilitation center to help out. About 20 people signed up and went to the farm. The group that i was part of was responsible of helping reinforcing and building a fence around a area so that a new horse that they received can have her own area to receive the additional attention to be restored to full health. After talking with the owner of the farm he told me that it is him and his wife that run it. They both work full time jobs to pay for the feed and medical care that the animal need. They have a hand full of volunteers that come on a regular basis to help out, mostly on the weekend. they have licence to take care of every native species in the state of Missouri, exotic cats, and many other. right now they have lions, tigers, horses, bob cats, dogs, cats, sheep, goats, geese, foxes, and many more.

When i first arrived on campus i was able to take part in many traditions on campus. One was what they call tiger walk, which is when the whole freshman class walks though the columns in the Quads towards Jesse hall. This is meant to show the freshman class coming in to mizzou, and then at graduation we are suppose to walk the other way though the column to show us going out into the world.

The second tradition that i was apart of was the painting of the M in the football stadium. This is where the freshman class get the big M on the hill in the Stadium ready for the first home game. there was about a 100 freshman that came. It was the biggest turn out ever. We split up into two groups in group was suppose to take trash bags and pick weeds and pick up trash, the other which i was in, was suppose to unload some rock on to the M evenly. We unloaded 2 tons of limestone by making line in less than a hour. As one big group we then took white paint and painted the rocks. We all had a great time and we went down as were about to walk around the feild for a while.