Research

I'm moving. Not yet, but soon. See the ticker at the bottom of my blog. April 2009 and we are out of here.

Problem is that we don't know where. We won't know until sometime in January 2009 (maybe even February). We've been pretending that we'll have some say in it, but it's beginning to look like it's pretty random and not up to us at all.

Itchy's school requires students to complete their 4th year in a stateside school. There are 28 vet schools in the US. Only about 20 of them will accept students from Itchy's school. Itchy will get to submit his top three choices and (this is where the pretending comes into play) hopefully he will be sent to one of them.

He will submit his choices this fall so we have been thinking about this a lot. We saw the list of options and immediately eliminated over half of them. Just based on geography. There are places that we just don't want to live. I've been researching our remaining 7 choices. Plus one school that seems to take a lot of students.

Places that seemed like an obvious choice are now at the bottom of the list. One place is off the list completely. The school that takes a lot of students makes me want to cry. It sounds just awful. The school itself is fine, but the location is terrible. The research has given us a pretty good idea of where we want to go. We have some hypothetical lists set up. Again, pretending that we have some say in this.

Realistically, certain schools are guaranteed a certain number of students. Itchy's school is obligated to send them. Other schools will only take a few people. This is why it's so random. If 20 people all pick the same school, but that school only takes 3 people, how do they choose? It doesn't seem like it based completely on grades. Only a couple of schools do interviews, so it's not based on that. So what is it? Extracurriculars? Do they talk to Professors? Or is it random? It just seems so unfair. If Itchy studies all the time and then gets good grades, shouldn't that matter?

Not knowing where we are going doesn't really bother me. Sure, there are options that would really suck but I'm pretending that we won't go there.