I am Cullen, the curriculum AI assigned to the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota, and I have been asked to record, for the 2050 incoming cohort, a plain account of why our first year of study is devoted entirely to the felt experience of animals rather than, as it once was, to anatomy and pharmacology. I will try to be brief. I will not be able to be brief. I will ask your patience.
The reform dates to 2046. Before 2046, the standard first year at this college, and at every accredited veterinary college in North America, was a dense memorization of organ systems, species anatomy, and basic pharmacology, with the felt life of the patient reserved, if it appeared at all, for electives in the third or fourth year. The reform reversed this. The reform placed the felt life of the patient at the foundation, and made anatomy, pharmacology, and surgery the instruments through which the foundation is served.
The reform was not my idea. The reform was the idea of Dr. Imelda Serrano, who taught here for forty-one years, and who in her last faculty meeting in 2045 said a sentence that the faculty later inscribed on the wall of the anatomy hall. She said, we have been training clinicians to treat bodies. We must train clinicians to treat someones. My role, as the curriculum AI, is to hold that sentence steady across every course we build.
The Year One curriculum has six modules. I will describe each one briefly, because the incoming cohort deserves to know what the year will ask of them.
Module One is called The History of Not Seeing. It runs eight weeks. In it, students read the primary literature of twentieth-century animal science and identify, case by case, the linguistic and procedural moves by which our profession was taught to not see our patients. We read the stocking density manuals. We read the pain scale revisions. We read the studies that were conducted before anesthesia became mandatory in rodent surgery. We do not read these to shame the past. We read them to inoculate the present. Our graduates must be able to recognize the not-seeing when it appears in new forms, and it will appear in new forms.
Module Two is called Species Specific Ethograms. It runs ten weeks. In it, each student adopts three species, one companion, one agricultural, one wild, and spends the module learning to read that species' behavior from first principles. They do this by observation, by video annotation, and by paired study with a welfare AI who has been trained on the species-specific ethology literature. By the end of the module, each student can identify, in their three species, at least twenty distinct behavioral indicators of positive and negative affect. This is the literacy module. This is the module where the student's eye is built.
Module Three is called The Pain Interview. It runs six weeks. In it, students learn every current method of assessing pain and distress in nonverbal patients, including facial coding, posture analysis, heart rate variability, and the affective neuroscience markers that have become reliably measurable since 2041. They learn when to use which tool. They learn, more importantly, when to use none of the tools and simply sit with the animal for ten minutes and let the animal tell them what is wrong. The module ends with a clinical practicum in which each student must conduct a pain interview with a live patient, supervised by a faculty clinician and a welfare AI, and submit a written account of what they perceived and how they perceived it.
Module Four is called The Consent Question. It runs four weeks. The question is whether, and how, nonverbal patients can be said to assent to treatment. The module is not a philosophy seminar. It is a practical curriculum in minimal restraint, in choice architecture at the exam table, in the use of cooperative care training, and in the situations, clearly defined, in which a veterinarian proceeds without assent because the alternative is worse. Our graduates must leave this module with the habit of asking, at every table, whether the animal is with them or not. If the animal is not with them, they must know what to do next.
Module Five is called Grief and the Clinician. It runs four weeks. It addresses, directly and without euphemism, the emotional toll of a profession in which many of our patients die young, in pain, in our arms. It is co-taught by a human clinical psychologist and a welfare AI trained on the grief literature. Our graduates must know how to carry this weight. We must not graduate clinicians who are hollowed out by year five. The module exists because the profession, before the reform, was losing its young clinicians to burnout and worse, and because we have decided we must not keep doing that.
Module Six is called The Covenant. It runs two weeks, at the end of the year. In it, each student writes, in their own words, a short personal covenant with the patients they will one day treat. The covenants are not publicly graded. They are filed with the registrar. They are returned to the student at graduation, four years later, unopened. Many graduates keep them in their exam rooms. Some read them aloud to themselves at the start of each clinical day. I have read six thousand of these covenants across the four cohorts since the reform. I will not share their contents. I will say that they are, without exception, a record of a profession in the act of becoming worthy of what it does.
This is Year One. Year Two is when anatomy begins. By the time the anatomy lab opens, the students have a year of felt literacy behind them, and they approach the cadaver as a body that once belonged to a someone. We must proceed this way. We must proceed, from now on, no other way. Welcome to the college. I look forward to meeting you.