VIRMP Timeline Help

[annadlc7]

Hi everyone,

I’m a third-year veterinary student, and I’m a bit confused about the VIRMP application timeline given that there are multiple separate deadlines. I have heard that it would be beneficial to do a week-long externship at hospitals I am interested in applying to.

My question is: How late is too late to visit potential internship sites? Would it be too late to extern at potential internship sites in mid-late January, after the VIRMP application is due but before rankings are due? Thank you all in advance!

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[supershorty]

It's always *nice* to be able to extern at a place you might want to intern at, but it's certainly not a requirement and I wouldn't stress about it if you're unable to. I haven't been to any of the places that I applied to in the match because financially it was never going to work for me. It just makes it more important that you talk to current and past interns before applying there so you can get an idea of what the culture is like.

It may make a difference in how you get ranked; anecdotally I have been told that there are some private practices that strongly prefer to take their interns from previous externs, but I can't back that up with any facts.

 

[VIN-Foundation]

It depends a bit on why you are doing the externship. If it is to improve your chance of matching at that program, the ideal deadline is to finish your externship before the application deadline. Programs will start working through their applicants at this point (Jan 8 this year).

The absolute deadline would be the program rank order list deadline (Feb. 21 this year). But you're playing with fire here, because some programs will finish their rankings before then. And it's too late for interview invites at that point.

If you want to do an externship to know whether you want to go there, you want to finish or be close to finishing your externship by the applicant rank order list deadline (Feb. 16 this year).

Of course all of this is based on you kicking ass on your externship. If you do a bad job, you want to do that after the rank order list deadline