Veterinary Profession - Happy, Suicidal, or Both?

I found an interesting article a couple weeks ago about veterinarians in the work place. It begins with saying how vets have a high level of job satisfaction - above physicians. Then it talks about how also have a very high suicide rate - 4x the general population in the U.S. and 2x other health professions. I've always heard that vets have the highest suicide rate in Europe, but I never knew if that was true or not. The article says the possible reasons are job stress, lethal drug access, and acceptance of euthanasia. Finally, it says that vets are happy people with large animal vets being happier than small animal.

Conclusion: Veterinarians are a happy, suicidal group of people.

A Quarter of a Doctor

I am officially a quarter of a doctor!! I have survived Finals. Anatomy was funny because no one studied for it and our class average displays that. On Tuesday, we had Histology aka the worst test ever. The professor told us that some of the questions would have 10 choices and that would somehow make it easier for us. Yeah, it didn't. Oh and did I mention that it was cumulative over the whole year, not semester - year. Everyone walked out of that exam feeling like all our studying was a waste of time and we have no idea how we did. The questions were very specific for covering a year's material. I should find out my grade by Wednesday. Vet school teaches us patience and provides practice for handling disappointment. The best part is that the second years tell us that it only gets worse.
The rest of finals week seemed fairly easy. I guess a ridiculously hard histo exam makes me appreciate the regular exams. Histo made physiology, parasitology, and radiology seem like a walk in the park. It became extremely hard to study for those exams too. Studying all day for over a week is not fun. Now I get to wait for the grades to be posted.
I will say that I am going through vet school withdrawal. I don't know what I should be doing with all of this free time. I feel like I should be studying or doing homework.

This is Going to Hurt

I have finished a few classes - business, pharmacology, nutrition, and maybe some others. BUT I am far from finished. More finals start tomorrow. I am unprepared for all of these and don't have time to get prepared. Histology on Tuesday is the scariest because it covers the whole year. By year, I mean Fall and Spring semester material. It's a 2 credit class too!

Physiology is also cumulative for the semester and I need to do well on it too. Radiology is on Friday and it should be easy, but there's still a lot of material I won't have time to look at until Thursday evening.

I am truly learning that Finals week is all about my GPA sustaining the least amount of damage possible. The funny thing is that I was trying to prepare for this the last 3 weeks and I'm still not ready. Well, 5 more days of sleeping, eating, studying, taking exams and repeating the next day.