An aspiring fifteen year old who wants to become a vet---What's my plan of action?

[TheWannaBeKid]

As you may be able to tell from the title, i am a mere 15 year old freshman. It has been ten years since i have established my life goal: Go to college for what i believe is 8 years, hopefully on a scholarship as my family cannot afford to pay, and become a veterinarian. This has been my goal as long as i can remember. At first, i wanted to be a domestic animal pet vet: cats and dogs. Then, i became interested in exotic pets: snakes, rodents, birds, etc. But after reading a book called "The Rhino with the Glue-on shoes", I became, and still am, determined to become a wildlife veterinarian.

I am excited that, being in high school, I can now begin to volunteer and start to really work on my future. I have no idea how to get to where i want to go, but I am determined to find out soon.


I have an advantage that many of you may not have had: I'm in community college. On Tuesdays and thursdays, i go to my local community college via school bus to take an eglish 121 class. although it is virtually useless to know how to write a rhetorical analysis, but this is temporary. when school starts next year, i will be taking all the zookeeping/animal husbandry/vet classes that i can. I hope this will give me a better chance of getting a scholar ship.

so, here's where you come in. can you help me become a wildlife vet?

TheWannaBeKid​

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[WhtsThFrequency]

Hey there.

You might have better luck posting in the pre-vet forum. We (the vets, students, and pre-vets) don't come to hSDN that often.

Well, the bad news is that the job market for wildlife veterinarians is... abysmal. Not just bad - abysmal. Not to mention the fact that after vet school, you'll most likely need to do multiple internships or a residency to get any wildlife or exotics position worth while.

I don't mean to say that to drive you away, but only to make you keep your options open. I know you won't believe me but you're only 15 and I promise you your interests will change over time. I was gung-ho exotics myself when I went to vet school, then ambulatory food animal practice, then cardiology, and finally ended up falling in love with pathology. I went on to a pathology residency and am currently in a research fellowship.

Scholarships for vet school are also almost nonexistant unless you take the military route. You are looking at an average of $140,000 (out of state tuition easily 200+) in loans for the four years of vet school alone, not counting undergrad. Combine that with starting salaries of $50-60k, the finances are something you absolutely have to consider if you want to go into this field.

Anyway, I know that sounds very doom and gloom. It's hard to be upbeat in the veterinary industry these days because the job market is so awful, the debt so high, and salaries so low. I graduated vet school in 2010 and I fear it is only getting worse with bigger class sizes, etc.

However, I still encourage you to educate yourself about the field as much as you can - just to do so without rose-colored glasses. Come by pre-vet, we won't bite

 

[that redhead]

WTF brings up excellent points per usual.

If you're interested in going to vet school for whatever reason, the first place to start at your age is veterinary experience. If you really like exotics and wildlife, I would suggest contacting your local zoo or aquarium and seeing what kind of programs they have available to high schoolers. Google around and see what you can come up with. You can also contact local veterinarians that may offer care for exotic pets and start shadowing them to see what that entails. The main idea is to become familiar with what a veterinarian does and see if it interests you. If you decide vet med still is something you'd like to do, it's important to continue to accrue veterinary experience (working with a vet) until your time of application. Working with animals in a general sense (pet store, farm sanctuary, etc) can still be put on your application but doesn't carry the same weight as vet experience.

Doing really well in high school can earn you a scholarship to an undergraduate university. Vet schools have pre-requisite courses that you take in college (organic chemistry, physics, etc) and it is very important to do well in those courses. They don't necessarily care if you've taken zoo or animal husbandry classes (except if animal science is a pre-requisite course). Like WTF said, vet schools don't really offer scholarships unless you go through the military and that is often quite competitive. If you want to go to vet school, be prepared to take out a lot of loans to pay for it.

Another thing to consider is that there are many other ways that you can work with wildlife as a career aside from veterinary medicine. You can do wildlife research, be a veterinary technician at a zoo, be an animal keeper at a zoo, etc. I have a friend who works with wildlife over in Africa through a research center and he "just" has his B.S. Just something to keep in mind

 

[Cracker.Jack.]

Another thing to consider is that there are many other ways that you can work with wildlife as a career aside from veterinary medicine. You can do wildlife research, be a veterinary technician at a zoo, be an animal keeper at a zoo, etc. I have a friend who works with wildlife over in Africa through a research center and he "just" has his B.S. Just something to keep in mind

This is an excellent point. I would suggest looking into ecology. I worked under an ecologist for a research project last year and was blown away by the amount of hands-on work they get to do with wildlife. I don't know about in the US but in Canada the job outlook for ecologists is pretty good. You can get a government job and work in national or provincial parks with pretty good job security.

 

[sgv]

Don't go into this for the money. If you go to a private vet school, you're looking at >$200K in loans. With a starting salary of $60K and after taxes and loan payments, you're looking at a $30K take home. Work your ass off so you can get into a cheap school. Almost no one can afford professional school out of pocket. Almost all of us borrow federal loans.