All of us, we have all been waiting for third year to start. We've been in the classroom.

Setting lectures of course is very important, very fundamental book being myself, I'm more of a person who's hands on.

Have to have the interaction with clinicians.

I was ready for a third year.

Once our students finished the first two years of our program, they immediately move downstairs into the teaching hospital, and our hospital is comprised of a number of rotations community veterinary service is commonly called CVS.

It is a third year rotation that our students spend four weeks on.

During that time, they have the opportunity to be the doctor and actually take care of patients.

This is my first rotation in CVS, and it's actually been great.

You get to vaccinate.

You get to teach your clients about heartburn prevention, flea synth, leg prevention.

You get to teach them about dental disease and getting them clean yearly, hopefully, and we will actually do work ups on those guys, blood work, radiographs, ultrasound, you name it, anything that a general practitioner would do.

We do it here as well, and the students get to take the lead on these cases and work with the doctors to make plans, make diagnoses, and be able to treat these guys in year three, we build upon the training and the textbook knowledge they gain in year two with our diagnostic imaging class.

So in year three, we do a four week radiology rotation where students finally get to apply all that they've learned in the classroom.

There are two main goals out of the rotation.

The first is to teach them how to interpret radiographs, and by the time they leave our rotation, they have seen 140 unique cases.

So we love teaching through repetition.

The other skill that they get is they learn how to acquire images, and more importantly, how that image acquisition is going to impact the radiographs coming out, and when that can affect their diagnosis.

So what we're aiming to do there is marry the idea of what we're going to do as a veterinarian, which is interpret imaging, with how important it is to get the correct imaging and do the imaging correctly.

And so they're going to do both of those at the same time.

Our students in the third year come to our rotation.

It's the laboratory services rotation.

They spend four weeks on our service with us, they assist in the clinical pathology diagnostic lab, learning about cases that come through there, looking at blood smears, analyzing chemistry results, CDC results, and also looking at urinalysis.

And then in the afternoon, our students come to the necropsy floor and do post mortem examinations, and we call that in the veterinary world necropsy.

You really can't learn about what a disease looks like until you've seen it, seen the changes in the organs.

So it was kind of an aha moment for me to see those things going from the classroom to seeing an animal's body and seeing the changes in that body and understanding that disease process.

And additionally, they do get exposure to molecular pathology while they're on the rotation.

This is an exciting and up and coming area of veterinary medicine.

Molecular Medicine focuses on identifying the genetic sequences, the DNA or RNA of that pathogen.

It's a highly sensitive technique, and it's what a lot of our new diagnostic techniques are becoming centered around during their lab services rotation, every veterinary student at Mississippi State University has the opportunity to travel down to the coast and assist with efforts in aquatic animal medicine.

We usually have about eight to 10 students per rotation, and we will all come down from Starkville, Mississippi to Gulfport, and we will spend a day or two down here.

The first day is usually working with live animals and doing physical exams and seeing the facilities.

And then the second day, we will usually perform a necropsy, usually on dolphins and sea turtles.

Necropsies can help us find out why the animals died, and that's important because it affects the herd health of the Gulf of Mexico.

So if a dolphin dies from freshwater incursion lesions or brucellosis or even human interaction, we can try to manage that better and be better stewards of our environment.

The dolphin aspect was actually really cool.

That's was on my bucket list of things to do is to see a dolphin that close, and the fact I was able to do a physical exam on it just blew me out of the water.

I was able to listen to the heart do palpation of the fins and body condition scoring, as well as looking at teeth and listening to vocalization, to be able to say that I've done a physical exam on any marine wildlife.

I just don't think you can get that experience anywhere else.

For the third year anesthesia rotation, the students will be here for four weeks, and you get to anesthetize, a client owned animal from start to finish for their first opportunity down here in the animal hospital.

You get to you.

Learn all the anatomy and physiology and pharmacology of drugs and put all of that together, and especially in really sick and complicated cases, having them come out successfully and say, Wow, I actually was able to do that.

I think it's fascinating, and I think that anesthesia is very scary for a lot of vet students and a lot of people in general, and understanding the basics of it and knowing why you're doing what you're doing makes it so much easier, and it's not really that scary.

The students are never alone.

There's always technicians and faculty around to supervise them, so they have a level of support.

Anesthesia is something that every veterinarian gets to do, and it's something that you need to be comfortable with, and that's why we offer the opportunity to have the practice while you have the anesthesiologist supervision and support so that you can successfully do it on your own in the future, by the time the students come to the surgery rotation in their third year, they've already had nearly a year of small animal medicine and surgery lab where they're doing spays and neuters, they're doing anesthesia.

They're learning the basic principles of surgery. And so they've gotten to practice some of these skills, and now they get to put them to use when they're in the surgical rotation.

In addition, though, the surgical rotation really teaches these students a lot more than just the surgery itself.

They learned quite a bit about doing comprehensive physical, orthopedic and neurologic exams on patients, working with patients while they're here in the hospital.

So working on their husbandry skills, developing skills in terms of choosing which diagnostic test they want to run for these patients with our guidance, and then interpreting those results, prescribing medications, treating patients post operatively, taking care of their patients when they're painful, working with them in ICU.

There are so many things they get to do on this rotation, including meeting and speaking to clients for sometimes the very first time, writing good medical records that then go to the clients and the referring veterinarians.

So these are skills that are not easy ones to develop, but they spend anywhere from four to six weeks on our rotation working on these skills in addition to some of the other rotations.

So it's really impressive to me how they grow during that time period, from the first week when they come on to the final week when they're pretty much working fairly autonomously. I work in the food animal medicine department.

I'm actually a board certified internist, but I work with the students that are in their third year of their education, and so that involves seeing cases, whenever they come down to the clinic, interacting with clients.

We do a lot of specialty level medicine, as well as a lot of routine herd health visits, as well as kind of primary care treatment as well.

We certainly will see beef cattle, dairy cattle, small ruminants, which include sheep and goats.

And we'll see the occasional llama alpaca. We see some pet pigs.

And so you get a nice menagerie whenever you come to the food animal department, when they come to me, we're going to see cases with the client.

We work hand in hand together, talk to the client, figure out what's going on, see the case together, and then ultimately decide what the animal needs, and we treat them together.

So I expect them to use those skills that they learn in their second year and then apply that to the case that they see at hand.

And so it's nice to see that spark whenever something finally clicks and they're able to do the procedure themselves and gain a lot of confidence in themselves when they're able to see a case, diagnose it, treat it, and then have them be more confident as they go out into the world.

Once they've graduated in your third year, you're going to rotate through equine internal medicine and equine surgery, and in that time, you get to handle a tremendous number of courses.

Students do all the treatments for their patients.

They do all the stall care, all the husbandry, and then, in addition, participate in any, you know, diagnostics or surgeries that those patients have, communicate with the owners.

We also have access to advanced diagnostics. We have the ability to do a really nice CT.

We have a three tesla MRI that takes amazing images.

I'm amazed at the number of students that have had no horse experience that end up liking this rotation because it's so different and very interactive.

A student can come onto this rotation having not really had much experience with horses and leave here feeling really confident that they know those details.

Students say, Wow, I just got to do so much on this rotation.

Population medicine and epidemiology is a part of veterinary medicine that a lot of people don't think about.

It's really all about figuring out what's going on in populations of animals, and we use the same techniques to figure out a lot of the things that we do.

Do an individual medicine as well.

So knowing the correct surgery to fix an injury or the correct medicine to give an animal that's sick all came about because somebody did studies on large groups of animals.

So that helps all animals, and it helps us as veterinarians, make decisions every day, whether it be shelter med or farm calls from from private farms or from corporate farms that deal with 1000s of animals that supply our food, food products here in the country.

And I've gotten to experience the population medicine rotation.

It was a great experience.

We learned a lot of things about herd health, and we actually got a chance to go to a couple different farms.

We got a chance to go to several fish facilities, processing facilities, and learn a lot about things that go into maintaining a healthy herd, a healthy food population.

We're one of the very few schools that has a population medicine program, and so I'm very proud of that, because I think our students leave here with a whole new way to think about what they're doing and how it affects the other animals and how it affects the environment.

And I think they leave here better clinicians, because they know how to make very good clinical decisions based on science and evidence.

One of the most liked parts of our curriculum is the opportunity students are given to customize the curriculum to fit their interests and needs.

In year three, students can begin completing their required, enhanced clinical practicums.

This allows them to select from participating veterinary practices across the country for two, four week ECP stints, and they can also complete up to eight elective weeks in subject areas and specialties they want to further explore or pursue or even just gain additional proficiency in prior to graduation, with the number of electives and the length of time they get to spend in these electives, they get a great deal of exposure to a variety of different topics.

I feel that our students really have a great advantage in that regard, because they get such a well rounded education.

And in addition, all these rotations are going to have material on their national board exam that they are still familiar have to be familiar with.

So I think it gives them a big leg up in that regard, and that's why our students do so well on the Natalie.

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