Each spring, students in Cornell's veterinary medicine program invite the community to visit the campus and see what veterinarians do. Families and children are encouraged to attend. Admission and parking are free. This is an excellent opportunity for pre-vets to meet current students and exchange information on veterinary school. At the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine students study actual clinical cases from their first day in the DVM program, discussing written summaries, lab results, radiographs and other data associated with the case.
Students work through four iterative phases in problem-based learning.
First, they reason through the problem presented in the written case, identifying educational needs or learning issues that need to be pursued, generating hypotheses and raising questions about the case. Second, students engage in a period of self-directed study in which they may pool their own knowledge, study textbooks and journal articles, consult with faculty experts, and explore other learning resources. Students then apply their new knowledge to the problem, probing the limits of their understandings, ruling out competing hypotheses, and evaluating their previous work. Finally, they summarize and integrate what they have learned. In this type of curriculum, student and teacher roles are deliberately altered.