Hi! Sorry to hear about the rejections you’ve gotten—I’m in the same boat so far!
I’ve known I wanted to go for vet school since about 2017, and for some reason I’m finding it much harder to find vets willing to take a shadow in the past few years than I did at first. I don’t know why that is, but it’s definitely frustrating and I’m sorry it’s giving you trouble. Don’t give up on looking! Vet-supervised experience is a super important part of an application. I do think that reaching out to vets in smaller towns around you is a good idea—even if you have to drive a bit, it would be worth it to get a veterinarian who’s open to having a shadow.
Are you looking for any specific specialization to gain experience in or are you asking any vet you can find? Given you have so few hours right now, I wouldn’t worry about it if, for example, all you can find to shadow is an equine vet but want to do small animal yourself, for example. A veterinarian is a veterinarian and since you’re between a rock and a hard place with your schedule, definitely cast as wide a net as you can! It doesn’t hurt to keep calling the ones that ghost you, either; they’ll either finally just tell you no or they’ll eventually have an opening. Every vet has been in your shoes, so they know you have to ask.
Beyond continuing the search, I do have a few ideas to help your application offset having less experience than some applicants. Keep in mind I can’t read admissions committee’s minds any better than the next person, but these are my thoughts:
Not having a lot of hours, especially recent ones (again, not that the ones from years ago don’t count; they matter and you should definitely always mention them whenever you list your experiences) might make admissions nervous that you aren’t very serious about vet med or that you are coming into it without enough knowledge of what it really entails day-to-day. So, you’d want the rest of your application to show them that isn’t the case.
First, I think you should use the “why do you want to be a veterinarian” VMCAS essay question to talk mainly about why you are serious about vet med and what you do know about the daily demands of being a veterinarian, as well as why you feel qualified to meet those demands. This might include talking about problems you’ve seen veterinarians face and how they resolved them, or explaining why a vet you worked with/shadowed is good at their job and exactly how you plan to emulate their good qualities.
Second, be sure to show your non-vet-med experiences. Not only will listing everything you’ve done, when, and how much time it took up help admissions understand why there wasn’t as much room for shadowing, but the skills you use in vet med can be honed in other professions. Customer service experience is very relevant (we do have human customers, after all), anything that requires organization, time management, and cleanliness translates to working in a clinic, and any experience you might have in human medicine (even a CPR class or similar) contributes to showing admissions that you’re a well-rounded person who can build on your life experiences to become a good veterinarian.
Finally, if you do need another cycle to get admitted, be mindful of how each school considers applicants. Not all of them have minimum experience requirements anymore, but be sure to check and make sure you don’t apply to any whose requirement you don’t meet (sounds obvious, but I mistakenly applied to several this year without realizing I was missing a pre-requisite, and now I have to take it this spring. Oops, but at least it’s fixable. Not meeting the experience requirement won’t be fixable mid-cycle). If you’re unsure about a particular school, by all means call their admissions office before the application cycle starts and just ask them how your level of vet-supervised experience might affect your compatibility with their program. It’s important, but it’s still only one factor on an extensive application, and every school is going to place a different value on it.
Also, some schools offer file reviews to rejected students after the cycle ends, so you may be able to find out this spring exactly how your hours affected your eligibility and what else admissions would like to see you improve for next time.
Best of luck with your search!
