Glasgow 150 years of excellent veterinary teaching

This year 2012 is the 150^th anniversary of the Glasgow University School of veterinary Medicine was founded by James McCall in 1862.

The 5to 7^th of October we had a “New Horizons Research Symposium” providing both history and current perspectives on veterinary research at Glasgow. It was amazing to see how big a contribution Glasgow vet school is making to the research in its field and made as all very proud to be a Glasgow vet student. The final James McCall Memorial lecture was delivered by out former dean Professor Stuart Reid, who is not the principal of the Royal Veterinary College in London.  All the student came for the Friday lectures. But all in all there were over 400 alumni that came from all over the world for the weekend events.

I also bought a book that has been published: The Glasgow veterinary school 1862-2012). If anyone else wants to buy it. I can be bough online www.universityofglasgowshops.com or at amazon.

James Herriot books has always been a great pride of the Glasgow vets. Alf Wight – pen name James Herriot graduated from Glasgow. For the 150year anniversary his son Jim Wight came and had a talk to all the student: very inspirational as a vet student.  His also given an interview you can watch here:

Jim Wight Interview

James McCall founded the Glasgow Veterinary College in 1862, one hundred years after the establishment of the first Veterinary School in Europe. The first class had 10 students enrolled and lectures lasted three hours a day. The fees at the time for the three year veterinary course were 16 pounds for the first year, 18 pounds for the second and 20 pounds for the third. The student numbers continued to increase and one hundred and forty-three student had enrolled by 1894.

Glasgow Vet 150 years

Today the university of Glasgow veterinary school is pre- eminent in teaching, research and clinical provision. They have researchers, clinicians and students from around the world providing an expert referral institution for Small animals at the Small Animal Hospital, Horses at the Weipers centre for Equine Welfar and Farm animals at the Scottish  centre for production animal health and welfare.  Glasgow also keeps getting awards for its research not only in Scotland but around the UK as well.  The school is also accredited with the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA). The north American veterinary licensing education (NAVLE) pass rate is up to 87% for 2011. We also became associated with SCAVMA(Student Chapter of the American Veterinary Medical Association ) last year as the first UK vet school, in addition to our Accreditation with, RCVS (Royal collage of veterinary Surgons), BVA (British veterinary Association) and BSAVA (British Small animal Veterinary association) plus a few more =)

Glasgow school of veterinary medicine is located on 80 hectare on the northwest boundary of Glasgow city, about 30 minutes from the main university at Gilmorehill. The school has 190 hectars commercial farm and research centre at Cochno, 15 minutes from the Garscube campus. There is about 179 staff: academic, research and support with additional 65 postgraduate research students and 30 post graduate clinical scholars and 500 undergraduate students here.

The university of Glasgow is constantly pushing their students to the limit academically and clinically. They emphasise that being a student is not only in the classroom but in the veterinary community as a whole. Being a good veterinarian isn’t just about small animals or large animals, it’s about incorporating veterinary medicine into our lives and giving back to the community, wether that’s is here in Scotland, Africa, India, Scandinavia or America. They focus on producing well rounded veterinarians that have the ability to flourish once they graduate and enter the great big world.

Me and Professor Stuart Reid

Me and our old Anatomy Professor Jack Boyd

All in all I can say that I’m proud to be a 4^th year vet student here at Glasgow. I’m lucky to have the chance to be a part of their family. Cos that’s that we are here at Glasgow- one big Family

Read Full Post »

Glasgow Snow Chaos

I’m back home in Norway. Last week was meant to be hell week with 5 exams in 5 days, but Glasgow weather managed to correct this. Monday the 6, December we had the Anatomy written exam, but at 7.30 am that morning it started snowing bad. It was like a mini blizzard. Seeing Glasgow isn’t used to having snow, this massive snowfall created chaos and a lot of students had problems getting to their exam, because all public transportation were cancelled.  I walked to mine, seeing I’ve moved very close to the vet campus. Tuesday we had our anatomy practical exam, and the week was meant to continue Wednesday with the biomolec exam.  Instead we received this

“EXAM UPDATE: All exams on Wednesday and Thursday are cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions. “ http://twitter.com/GlasgowUni. Later we got this
“ The University has decided to cancel examinations scheduled to be held on Wednesday 8 December and Thursday 9 December. It is expected that the examination schedule will resume on Friday 10 December, but a message will be on the website by noon on Thursday about the rest of the week. As it is impossible to reschedule all the cancelled exams in December arrangements will be made for them to be held in January.”
We still had out Animal Husbandry exam Friday, but biomolec and physiology will now be held one of the first weeks back after our Christmas break. One of the American girls in our year asked me “so Annette, as a Norwegian citizen, had exams ever been cancelled for you because of snow?”  I just laughed and said no, because from Norway where we have a lot more snow than 10-15 cm, I have never had an exam cancelled because of snow. I’m actually quite happy that biomolec and physiology was rescheduled because physiology had a lot of information to it this term, so it’s nice to have some extra time reading over the material. There were a lot of mixed feelings about the rescheduling of the exams, some students were angry that they now have to read over break, and some had the same feeling like me. I mean they did schedule 5 exams in a week, so the fact that we had a 2 day break and 3 exams instead kind of lowered the stress level.

I left Glasgow after my exam Friday to fly out from Edinburgh, I didn’t fly until 9 at night, but left my flat early. This was good, because it had gone from -11’c to 6+ that day so the snow had started to melt, creating floods on the roads and a lot of roads were closed. I reached the airport after 4 hours of travel, which normally takes me 2-3 hours. Landed at Gardermoen, Norway at midnight and was of course the last person getting my bag.  Next week I’m working some for my mum and looking forward to seeing all my girls as they get back from around Norway where they study. Were all going to Hemsedal for New years so I hope I get to go skiing.

Read Full Post »

Veterinary education at the click of a mouse

Wikivet- Veterinary help tool I love it, I mean we use Wikipedia enough of the time. Going to join and see if its any good=)
I’ll keep you posted

The Royal Veterinary College has collaborated in creating WikiVet, the world’s first comprehensive online knowledge base for veterinary students, nurses and graduates. WikiVet helps veterinary students keep abreast of changes to the curriculum and gives them learning tools, such as flashcards, videos and clinical case examples at the clic … Read More

via Welcome to the Study London Blog

Read Full Post »

Professor Boyds Party Trick – Glasgow Vet 2009

My 69 year old anatomy lecturer Professor Boyd at Glasgow vet School, did his party trick during a dissection for Children in Need=)
Hes a legend!!

Read Full Post »

Back to Glasgow

I flew back to Glasgow on the 4th on January, when I moved to Scotland I was told it hardly snowed ever, but well when I landed it was completely white.  This caused complete chaos because most people never drove on snow before.  The 5^th of January I was driving to the vet campus for my 9o’clock lecture. I knew about the snow so I left 20 minutes before I normally did. It takes me around 20-25 minutes to get to the vet campus during rush hour, but today was different. The roads were bare, but the sidewalks and fields around were covered in snow. This caused people to panic so even when taking short cuts I used 2 hours driving to the vet campus and missed my first lecture. I was not pleased.  The week went by quite quickly, Friday came and it was dissection day again. We were continuing on the Hindlimb of the dog for revision until our next anatomy exam.  Because Glasgow wasn’t used to the coldness it was quite cold in the dissection room. All the students were wearing wool hats and scarves during the dissection making it quite amusing.

I wanted to start the year off healthy, so during the weekend I started my vegetable soup diet. It included eating vegetables, fruit and vegetable soup for an entire week. It’s quite hard, and you get very tired of the soup, but I managed to keep it without cheating and lost 5kg in that week ( I gained about half again the week after, so all in all down 2.5kg, woho). Me and my class mate Brianna have signed up to the gym and is doing a class called muscle tone on Tuesdays and Pilates on Wednesday in addition to my football team practice. Working out will keep our energy up so that we can keep fit while we read. It’s quite good being two about it, because then we keep each other from skipping out.  I haven’t really done much else the past two weeks because we had an anatomy written and practical exam Friday the 22^nd. Me and Brianna have been reading none stop, after every lecture, every night we have meet up and read for a couple of hours. I think the exam went pretty well, so let’s cross our fingers and see in 2-3 weeks when the results come out=)

This weekend we took a long deserved break, we went out with some of the UK students to cheesy pop in the Glasgow Student Union on the Friday to dance. Sunday I went and got some headphones  I’ve been drooling over since before Christmas, as a treat for staying focused and reading for anatomy.

My headphones ,aren’t they cute?
well that’s all for now, back to the books=) Miss you all at home
XxX

Read Full Post »