Any advice?

[OHlivia]

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I go to a really small school with no other pre-vets that I know of, and we've only sent 1 person to vet school in recent history. Therefore, our pre-health advisor really only knows about medical school and a tiny bit of dental school but, though she's tried very hard, I'm really missing out on the whole advisor thing. I've done a ton of research and have memorized stats and information on lots of schools, but I know there are probably some things that advisors can tell you that the internet can't. Does anyone have any general words of wisdom? And also, has anyone else out there been in the same situation and gotten accepted?

 

[TrocarKarin]

If it makes you feel any better, I go to a decently large school, and I might as well not have advisors, since they seem to exist solely to steer students in the wrong direction.

So far they've told me that I need to take the math department's stats in addition to biostats (confirmed with schools that its not true,) that I have to take a full year-long sequence for CSU (when all they require is biochem with orgo as a prereq,) and that biochem HAS to be taken as a chemistry class, not as a biology class.

Its basically gotten to the point to where I don't believe anything they say until I've confirmed it with a vet school first. At least you're missing out on advisors like mine.

 

[DVMorBust]

If it makes you feel any better, I go to a decently large school, and I might as well not have advisors, since they seem to exist solely to steer students in the wrong direction.

Pretty much same here.

Luckily, most schools are very willing to work with potential applicants - I've got many emailed conversations from the schools I applied to, verifying what courses could be used for prereqs, etc.

Also, SDN has been an invaluable resource for this process. I definitely would not have made it this far without the support and advice of everyone on here.

So, I guess general words of wisdom would be to ask questions of the source (which is helpful in more than one aspect - I narrowed my school list based on the tone of some conversations previous to application). The best way I found of utilizing resources, going through the process without advising, was to use the schools I was applying to to get the 'what' for any question, and SDN to get the 'how' if I got stuck.

That and 'question everything'. Never follow advice without thinking it through. Even if the advice was solid and winds up being what works, thinking over suggestions will help you figure out how to address future issues in the process on your own.

 

[Truth74]

Do NOT get me started with undergrad advisers. I took a year of utterly worthless classes, because I listened to him instead of calling the adviser at the vet school. When I think about it I just!

 

[DVMorBust]

Yeah - I was told I'd have to attend UG for another 4 years because my advisor wanted me to ... take English 101 and all the humanities gen ed stuff ...again... when I had a degree in Linguistics? Then it was 'oh, yeah. Well, you can just take one or two classes a semester and be done in four.' Down to 'well, maybe three and a half'.

Loaded up on full-time science, and now it's two years to the day pretty much after the aforementioned (first and last) meeting...

 

[OHlivia]

Lol...well its nice to hear that I'm not missing out on much, in some cases at least. Thanks for the advice.

 

[Trilt]

A friend of mine planning to go to Michigan was told by her advisor that botany was a pre-req... ._.;

I personally think reading this forum is much better than any advisor you could have.

 

[Poochlover11]

I was told by an advisor that you needed at least a 3.5 to get into vet school. However, based on the successful applicant thread on here I would say that isn't true. Besides, a 3.5 is about the average GPA of students getting into vet school (meaning there are people below a 3.5 getting in. Yay!!! )

 

[Tiempo]

If it makes you feel any better, I go to a decently large school, and I might as well not have advisors, since they seem to exist solely to steer students in the wrong direction.

LOL. It would be funnier if it weren't so true! Academic advisors were quite probably the most frustrating thing about undergrad. Conflicting advice, wrong information, it was really excellent.

I do agree that SDN is a great source of information. Good luck!

 

[dgm]

Don't sweat it! As people have mentioned, between SDN & the vet schools' admissions departments, you will be able to get all the information you need.

I considered staying on at my school another year after I finished my engineering degree, to finish up with vet school prereqs. To that end, I met with the pre-health advisor there, who basically laughed in my face and told me that there was no way in hell I was getting in, unless I got several years' worth of straight As. (I think I had a 3.25 at the time). I actually believed her and wrote the whole idea off, only to come back to it a few years later, talk to someone in admissions at Penn, and be told that I probably would be a strong candidate but just needed to take X, Y, and Z courses. I could just kick myself for actually listening to the advisor at my undergrad six years ago. You're probably better off without...

 

[DVMorBust]

The thing is...advisors are really useful for navigating the institution they work at, not for whta happens after (unless you have one of the rare ones)

 

[DreamDVM]

I agree with everything here. My "pre-vet" advisor made me think I was screwed and probably wouldn't get into vet school at first. He also spent about an hour (really, a real hour) telling me to make sure it was okay that I won't make much money. He also spent about 20 minutes telling me how dangerous vet school can be, and how as a 135-pound girl I might not be able to control a 1-ton bull (I fail to see how a 200-pound man can control a 1-ton bull, but whatever). In the last 15 minutes or so he looked over my transcript and said I should retake some classes.

Aaanyway I think my advice in this case is to not settle on ANY one source of information. Use the internet, read forums like this one, talk to everyone you can find: vets, other pre-vets, vet students, admissions officers, people with vets in their family, whatever. There is so much advice out there!

Good luck 🙂 LeAnne

 

[stick91]

I also went to a very small school. Tried to start a pre-vet club but there wasn't much interest and I was the only one in my graduating class who had any intention to go to vet school. The pre-health advisor sort of tried but I found her utterly useless (there are some big differences between pre-vet and pre-med!) and so I forged my own path. I also contacted all of the vet schools to try and get some more recent information from them for current/future students to use as a reference. You just have to be proactive about looking up school's requirements and making sure you meet them. Since my undergrad was small they didn't always offer all of the classes I needed when I needed them (like microbio and animal nutrition).

SDN has been EXTREMELY helpful for addressing a lot of questions that I had during the application process. (BTW, I took a year "off" after undergrad, applied, and got into two places).

Had I known more I may have taken a few different classes during undergrad, like cell bio, which a fair number of schools seem to want, but overall I was thrilled with my undergrad education and I definitely would not have changed where I went!

 

[VAgirl]

These posts are making me feel much better about not getting the pre-vet peer adviser position at UCD that I applied for a few weeks ago... 🙂

FWIW, the advisers and my undergrad were useless, too, but I didn't fully appreciate how rampant it was.

 

[Tiempo]

The thing is...advisors are really useful for navigating the institution they work at, not for whta happens after (unless you have one of the rare ones)

Heck, if my undergrad advisors would have at least been helpful within their own institution, I wouldn't have been so aggravated by it all!

 

[1CellNtheSea]

My advisor was, for the mostpart, a good advisor in terms of helping me to pick classes I needed to graduate. Other than that, he didn't know much about getting into vet school and even told me he didn't. (Even though my undergrad has a vet school and tons of pre-vets) He also tried to convince me that I should major in poultry science and go into the poultry plant industry to make a lot of money without going to vet school. Too bad it was never about the money (or chickens)!

 

[sumstorm]

I attended a small school with 100% med school applicant acceptance (everyone that applies to med school from there over the last however many years has been accepted to at least one school in the US.) I was the only pre-vet at the time, but did participte in the pre-med/health club.

I had a wonderful advisor, but he made it very clear to me (and our school did this for all students) that his objective was to assist me in fullfilling the pre-reqs for the school and my major, to help me find suitable schedules, and provide guidance on how things like internships worked (paperwork, etc.) He suggested that I come up with a list of what I needed for any schools I wanted to consider attending and bring it to all of our meetings, but that, in the end, my education was my responsibility.

So, to that end, Ithink you can probably figure it out, especially with help on SDN and from the admissions offices of vet schools (which can tell you if they allow substitutions etc.)

 

[aussie86]

I also went to a very small school with maybe 2 or 3 others in the past 10 years going to vet school. As mentioned, SDN was very helpful although I didn't discover it until the interview process had begun. I also went to the conference in DC and emailed a lot of schools with questions; the admissions offices were all very helpful. What helped me ALOT was the publication by the AAVMC about all the different vet school requirements, previous year's stats such as average GPA, GRE, etc., costs, AP scores, and all that stuff. I would suggest it for any pre-vet; I must have read it a million times deciding where to apply and what classes to take. Its called the Veterinary Medical School Admissions Requirements and they update it and publish a new edition every year. Good Luck!!

 

[VAgirl]

I attended a small school with 100% med school applicant acceptance (everyone that applies to med school from there over the last however many years has been accepted to at least one school in the US.)

No idea if your school was one of these, but my undergrad was... my UG maintained their high % acceptance rate by med schools by systematically weeding out anyone that they didn't think would be accepted by med school. I personally found this practice awful. It meant that students had to prove to the premed advisers that they should be accepted into med school by jumping through all of their hoops or the advisers would basically make sure you didn't get in. (The committee letter was their main tool of power.) I thought it sucked. Again, don't know if your school did this and I'm not saying it did. But I know other schools with high med school acceptance rates did, and I abhor the practice. Thank goodness we don't have to jump through those kind of hoops for vet school (others, sure, but not those) or I wouldn't be sitting here doing what I'm doing today.

Sorry, tangent, but I had to let that out.