I didn’t know that but I guess it’s good that my friend started collecting her pension at such a young age. Maybe you should consider getting into another field while you are still so young? I certainly wouldn’t be happy about contributing to someone else’s pension knowing it won’t be there for me when I retire.
OP, I also had a childhood dream of going to vet school and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I managed to get through sophomore year of a Pre-Veterinary medicine curriculum in undergrad before realizing the dream wasn’t really for me. I spent the first 5 years of my career having to explain to employers why my BS is in Animal Science and why they should hire me anyway (though I usually have a lot of fun with that question in interviews). Here’s what factored into my decision:
-
As a poster mentioned above, actually getting into veterinary school is difficult. There are fewer veterinary schools in the world than medical schools, but the rigor is just as hard. You will be competing with a lot of other animal-loving young adults, and most admitted vet students were not admitted on their first application cycle. You will need very good grades, numerous veterinary experience hours (many, if not most of which will be volunteer/unpaid), and a full complement of extracurriculars. I am not saying it is impossible to get into vet school, but realize that there are many more applicants to vet schools than there are spots available in the class. Organic Chemistry and Physics and Microbiology are all very difficult classes where there are no animals to be found, but they are fundamental to medicine of any kind. If you can’t make good grades in these classes, vet school classes will be even harder - they will build on the information presented in your undergraduate classes and the professors will expect you to know those concepts.
-
I actually hit my required number of experience hours before I bailed. I loved it! I spent a summer working for a small animal clinic and two more working for a small-practice equine vet. As I said, I had a great experience and especially loved working with the equine vet I shadowed under. However, I realized I was getting the best side of the experience - being a traveling horse vet is fun in the summer when the weather’s nice, the roads are good, and there’s babies to check in on and lameness exams to conduct and vaccines being given. Not so much when you’re tubing a horse for an emergency colic in the snow with poor lighting.
2a) My vet and I got along great and we still have a good relationship to this day. However, she definitely warned me about the hard parts, for which I’m eternally grateful. She was coming back from having her second child (she would go on to have another), and so was working part-time. However, the veterinary associations and loan providers don’t care if you’re part-time - you still have to pay your dues and keep current on your loan payments. Horses don’t get easier to work with when you’re pregnant. My vet was lucky enough to be part of a small, busy practice with a good reputation so she didn’t have to cover the costs of overhead, but if you’re solo practice that is a very real possibility. -
The debt is staggering. If you get admitted to school, there’s still the matter of paying for it. The return on investment when you compare student debt to first-year salaries is not good. You will most likely be paying off your loans well into your 40s. If you get the experience, get the grades, and can still imagine no other life than veterinary medicine, then it may be worth it to take on that burden in order to live your dreams. If you’re anything less than 100% sure, it’s a very big financial risk.
-
Again someone mentioned this above, but the burnout phenomenon among vets is very real. With wages stagnating but cost of living continuing to rise, horse owners have less money to spend on their animals but the cost of treating them isn’t getting lower. You will be forced to provide the care that the owners can pay for (or obtain credit for), not what is in the best interests for the animal. My vet cried with me when I told her that I only had a certain amount of money I could spend treating my horse for Potomac Horse Fever, and that if she didn’t have a real chance of similar quality of life at the end of it, I would have to euthanize her. Fortunately (?) for me, her disease progressed so rapidly that euthanasia was the only real option, and I came very close to but did not exceed the dollar limit I set for her care. Are you prepared to have to usher horses out of this life when medical options are available, but the owner lacks the funds to pay for them? Are you prepared to bear the brunt of frustrated owners lashing out about the cost of taking care of their animals? The suicide rates cited above are not exaggerated.
-
Your time will be stretched. As a young vet, you will be paying your dues - you will be on call a lot, if you’re employed by a practice. If you’re a solo practitioner - well you are it, unless you make on call arrangements with another solo vet. You will wrap up one emergency only to get called to another, and while treating that emergency get a call from the first owner that the horse has worsened. There’s a saying, “the shoemaker’s sons always go barefoot”. Meaning, when you’re a vet, other people’s horses will take priority above your own.
I don’t say all of this to scare or discourage you, but it’s what I wish I had known when applying for college. I would’ve chosen a different path had I realized all of this. It worked out okay for me - I have a well-paying job in healthcare admin now, and my science-heavy academic background helped me get a foot in the door at that first job. I worked hard and got promoted and had enough money to keep my own horse in a backyard barn and ride the trails and take lessons. I think you will enjoy the horses more if they aren’t your job, but your after-work escape.
You are young and have the opportunity to explore what it is that you actually want to do, and if I could go back I would do as many summer internships in as many different things as possible and try to find something that gets me really excited. If I rewound to the summer of 2009, before I entered my freshman year of college, I would major in business (skills that serve you well in a wide variety of jobs), and look for internships at companies that do things that sound interesting to me. Maybe I’d change the course of my degree if I found something I really loved doing those internships, and it required a more specialized degree. Please don’t lock yourself into a program like Pre-Vet without thinking about your Plan B, your Plan C, and even a Plan D if vet school isn’t something you see yourself doing.
Not sure I agree with this. As a third year, I don’t feel like my undergrad physics or o-chem have helped me AT ALL in vet school, they just seem like weed-out classes. I do markedly better in vet school than I did in undergrad (which may be because I’m actually interested in the material and apply myself more…). The only undergrad class I think really made a difference in my curriculum so far is biochemistry, and microbio to a smaller extent. My grades in undergrad were a little above average, but nothing spectacular in those harder science classes. I’m not sure they’re really a good indicator of the ability to succeed in vet school.
Supershorty, your experience is certainly more valid than mine - I got weeded out in o-chem myself! However I do have a handful of classmates who did go on to vet school (mainly at Penn since that is most local to us) and it was certainly no walk in the park for them, especially the first two years.
I mainly cited those classes to point out that “I want to be a vet really badly” isn’t enough to get in. OP is in high school, and there’s a huge possibility that her current curriculum has never really challenged her. I breezed through high school without really having to try, and then had a serious culture shock in college when I realized I actually had to put effort in and study. Part of that was learning HOW TO study, which is difficult if you’re behind the curve already. Whether those higher level science courses are relevant to the vet school curriculum aside, you do need to take them to be admitted to vet school, and I think many of us didn’t realize how hard they might be until we were actually in them.
Lots of good advice here.
Fact:
I know several people that went the vet route. One who just finished up an internship was $200k in school loan debt and hoping to start at $45k. Truly a ‘labor of love’. And, after starting at $45k at an equine practice, this person is now looking for a job in small animal. Less laboring, more money. I know of a couple of other horse vets that have gone/are going to small animal. Would also not do Vet Tech. I have never known one that made more than $17/hr, but I know plenty with loans in excess of $40k. I’m in the Midwest.
Personal opinion or read in the news (what I would consider ‘real’ news if there is such a thing):
Have a few teachers and nurses in the family. Personally, I would not age myself unnecessarily in teaching. Another ‘labor of love’ job.
Nursing, PT, and OT are all big right now. Even the assistants are netting good wages. Be careful if you spend holidays with your family or travel. All of those jobs need coverage 24/7.
Dental hygenist isn’t a bad gig either with little to no holiday or weekend hours. My DH travels at least once a year if not more all over the world. I look forward to going to the dentist just to hear her stories!
Finally, if you’re into numbers and programming, Big Data is paying well too as we have a labor shortage in that area from what I’ve read.
Good luck!! Ultimately, you should do whatever your heart and gut tell you which is hard in itself because everyone will tell you it’s wrong. You’ll have to decide to be true to yourself (w/o draining other’s resources) or do what everyone else thinks you should do.
1 Like
While you’ll probably never have to draw another chair structure or write the mechanism for a Fischer esterification, I do think that a correctly-taught OChem (or Orgo east of the Mississippi) course teaches a few things that should be useful in med/vet/dent/etc school: critical thinking, tools needed for a differential diagnosis, not chasing zebras when you look for the solution to a problem, and digging deep and learning something hard. Not to mention that it may help you to get the MCAT or DAT scores to get you into post-graduate study and that biochemistry is a lot of applied organic chemistry.
But I don’t think that it’s necessarily a be-all, end-all predictor for success in med/vet/dent/etc school or, more importantly, a predictor for a quality medical care provider.
When I write reference letters for med/vet/dent/etc I try to emphasize the problem-solving skills and the ability to take on something difficult, along with working well with others in lab groups. Also ethics, as I won’t write a letter for someone with a whiff of academic dishonesty. For dental school I will also mention that we do the small-scale labs because they like to hear about a student’s ability to work with small things.
Besides, we draw awesome hexagons.
[ATTACH=JSON]{“alt”:“Click image for larger version Name: OCHEM_hexagon.jpg Views: 1 Size: 18.5 KB ID: 10140878”,“data-align”:“none”,“data-attachmentid”:“10140878”,“data-size”:“small”}[/ATTACH]
1 Like
Don’t stress about it right now. Take classes in college that are good all around and do your best in all of them even if you end up not liking them. My husband is someone who can excel when he has a goal but when he first started in undergrad he lost that motivation when he found out he wasn’t well suited to computer engineering. Well those grades still show up on his transcript. Now he’s fighting that gpa trying to get a masters in his field.
I was always vet school right from the start. I added a biochem degree in undergrad but was always aimed at vet school. I took a semester off to do a student internship at a big practice in Ocala and loved it. Went to vet school and was equine sports med through and through. Did an internship in Wellington, FL and then after little success getting a job in an area I wanted to be in decided to go small animal. And I love it. I had already decided after my internship I didn’t want to be at a referral facility and I hated being on call. Also top notch sports vets are always on call for their big time clients. Horse bleeds after the grand prix you’re there at 10:30. Horse takes an off step on Sunday when being hacked. You’re on the phone. You don’t have much you time. Some people love it and thrive on it. After doing “emergency” prepurchase radiographs I decided it wasn’t for me.
Now I have no on call, set hours (work 4 days a week), a higher salary with bonusing and time to spend living my life which included riding my horse.
Basically you don’t have to know right away what the rest of your life is gonna be. There are pros and cons to most jobs. I know a lot of people who went to vet school, started in a clinical setting and hate it. Clients are tough day in and day out. Like retail with way more emotion. Take prevet courses but take other classes too. I took epidemiology classes and things like Magic and Witchcraft.
As someone who just graduated from vet school… don’t go to vet school. The low pay, long hours, and burnout that comes with clinical practice is just not worth it. Even if you could afford a horse around your massive loan payments, you wouldn’t have time to ride it. I got lucky in that the specialty I’m pursuing (pathology, which has been mentioned a few times here) pays better and has regular hours, but it also requires an additional three years of low-paying residency. Vet med is in a crisis right now and I would not recommend the field to anyone.
