Life as an Aggie

Disclaimer: No part of this post is meant to be a criticism of my school, teachers, or classmates.

"Aggie -(N Amer. informal) a student of agricultural science [abbreviation]" - Oxford Canadian Dictionary

Today I walked into my 8:00 am class and nodded a greeting to my professor, who was on his cell phone.  I sat down in my regular spot, pulled out my binder and iPad, found a couple of pens that had gone missing, and waited for class to start.  My professor (who is a veterinarian and probably fielding a work call) left the room and as I glanced up to see where he was going, I found myself face-to-face with a very life-like plastic cow head.

This thing was staring at me for an hour of class this morning...creepy, eh?

It was a bit creepy at first, but not really surprising.  In my second year of the Ag Management diploma, not very much surprises me anymore, especially in classes like Livestock Health and Disease.  The cow head got me thinking, though, about how being an Aggie is so different from any other educational experience.  I would like to share with my readers a bit about what it is like to be an Aggie.

My classroom is sometimes a barn.  Literally.

Most of the time, we have classes in lecture halls, just like everyone else.  But sometimes, we have class in the barn.  I'm not talking just about labs here.  This year some of the classes are so large that we don't all fit into the little classroom-type area in the Livestock Center, so there are tables and chairs set up in the barn, along with a projector, screen, and white board for the teacher to use.  Let me tell you what happens when a class has lectures in the barn:

• There are a lot of flies around.  That should end once winter comes.  Then we'll be wearing parkas to class (don't worry; the barn is heated...a little).
• If the door is left open a bit, animals walk in.  I don't mean cows; they're all locked up in their pens.  I mean animals of the cat and dog variety.  My professor had to shoo a dog out of the "classroom" just the other day.
• Since the barn is used for labs, we get to look at the bits of anatomy that the first-years were exploring earlier in the day if they haven't yet been disposed of.  That may sound gross, but it really isn't.  Well, not to me anyways.  Really, it's shocking how many squeamish people there are in my livestock classes.
• The internet is really slow on that end of campus, so everyone has to turn off the wi-fi on their cell phones so we can all have decent internet on our laptops and tablets.
• The floor is always dirty.  That's all I want to say about that.

Field trips are actually in fields (most of the time).

Sure, sometimes we go to downtown Calgary to look at successful business models and such, but often we get to visit farms, where we meet the farmers right in their fields or barns.  Sometimes we tramp around in random fields and pastures looking for grasses and such to identify.  It's pretty fun.

Boots are important.

Walking around campus I see all sorts of boots: work boots, rubber boots, steel-toed boots, winter rubber boots, and cowboy boots (of course).  We are required to have steel-toed work boots for certain classes (machinery classes, for example).  Rubber boots are also required and are just awfully nice to have on those days when we get to go tramping through muddy corrals or clean the barn after palpating cows.  In the winter, we wear insulated rubber boots for the same purposes.  Then there are the cowboy boots.  What can I say about them?  They are not required.  Running shoes are far more comfortable.  Those boots were not made for walking.  But they're just so stylish!  

Sometimes classes are held outside.

These are lab-type classes.  Do you remember being in high school and begging the teacher to let you have class outside on those warm, sunny spring days?  I get to have classes outside quite often.  The only thing is, it's not usually warm and sunny.  I've learned to use GPS without mittens on frigid fall mornings, checked the college cows during calving in the middle of winter (in the middle of the night), and stood hunched over my lab question sheet, trying to shield it from the rain as the teacher tried to make his explanation as quick as possible so we could all get inside.  When a teacher says, "dress for the weather on Tuesday," I listen.

The variety of classes is overwhelming.

For example, the following is a list of all of the Ag Management classes that I will have taken at Olds College by the time I graduate this spring:

• Workplace Communication
• Workplace Professionalism
• Principles of Marketing
• Range and Forage Crop Management
• Agricultural Management Principles (Economics)
• Survey of Agribusiness
• Agribusiness Accounting
• Advanced Product Marketing
• Principles of Animal Agriculture
• Environmental Farm Management
• Agribusiness Information Technology
• Agribusiness Planning and Management
• Beef Cattle Management
• Machinery and Technology
• Farmstead Management
• Livestock Health and Disease
• Livestock Breeding Strategies
• Precision Cropping Systems
• Principles of Soil and Crop Nutrition
• Agribusiness Financial Management
• Personal Selling and Customer Relations Management
• Introduction to Welding
• E-Marketing
• Field Crop Management
• Livestock Nutrition
• Introductory Pest Management

Need I say more? (At the end of this blog post I will post pictures that I have stored on my iPad from various classes.  WARNING:  If you are squeamish, skip that part of the blog!!)

Class presentations are actually interesting.

Okay, so there are still some boring presentations.  However, since a lot of us are going back to the farm, we get to do a bunch of major projects on our own operations and present them to the class.  It's like farmer show and tell.  I find them interesting.

Sometimes people don't show up for class for a week or two.

It's called harvest and it has a higher priority than classes.  The students always show up eventually and get caught up.

Students openly carry knives around with them and that's perfectly okay.

I don't really know what else to say about this.  It is what it is and what it is, is normal.

It gets a bit weird talking to students from other schools.

Once I was talking to a friend at church who is taking some kind of computer program at a school in Edmonton.  I was just starting to go glassy-eyed when he said something about "AI".  Now in tech language, AI is an abbreviation for artificial intelligence.  I knew that, but all I could think of was the agricultural definition of AI, which is not something one normally discusses in church.  That conversation got pretty awkward pretty fast.

- - - - - -

I could go on about life as an Aggie, but for now I think I'll wrap it up before I get too long-winded.  I hope you had fun looking into my life for a few minutes!

As promised, here are some random pictures from my classes (WARNING: Not for the faint of stomach!!):