Back Up...HELP!!!

[agonz5]

Hello,
So I am a student at Mercy College and I just got my grades back for my first semester. All A's and B's...but I missed entry into their pre-vet program by less then one point. That being said, I can either retake the class or switch my major to bio.

While looking into switching my major and doing research and stuff like that I have read some very scary things. Statistics on how many people actually make it into vet school, how many people make it through vet school, and how much debt people have coming out of vet school. And its scaring me. I've never had a back up plan. When I was little/middle school/high school I switched around what I wanted to do quite a bit but animals have always been part of my life. I've always found learning about them interesting. When everyone was watching cartoons I would sit and watch Animal Planet all day. It wasn't until about 2 years ago when I started volunteering and getting very involved with a rescue in my town that I said "this is it. this is what i want to do for the rest of my life" and the only way evident to me was to be a vet. So without doing any of this research im doing now I found a school that offered a pretty good prevet program, applied and got in. But now I'm having second thoughts.

Not just having 2nd thoughts about getting into vet school, but the debt that it's going to put me in. I am already taking out 15,000 in loans a semester to pay for this school. I don't even want to think about what I'm going to have to pay when I get out of vet school.

So, is there any plausible,concrete job out there to do with animals that I could get if I don't make it into vet school, which is seeming very plausible at this point? If I do the prevet major I will be graduating with a "Bachlors in Science" and if I do the bio major ill graduate with a bachelors in biology. I did make the grade for Mercy's Vet Tech program, but the amount of debt I will be in after undergrad school and the fact that live in New Jersey where you don't need a tech license doesnt make sense to me for a job that pays 15/hour.

Thanks!

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[WildAnimal]

It scares me too. And the fact that I'm going to one of the most expensive schools scares me even more. I took some time before applying to vet school and part of the reason for that was evaluating whether I really wanted to go into that kind of debt and trying to find something else I loved. Unfortunately everything that I even remotely thought I would like involved animals, and almost no animal careers make much money. I finally decided to go for it after a lot of intense thought.

I chose MWU because of my kids. Their dad was unwilling to move and I felt they needed to be with both parents. It's the only school I applied to. It's an absolutely incredible school and I'm very happy with it, but it is expensive and it's a private school so I don't get an IS rate. If location doesn't matter, I would take the above advice and go for the cheapest school if you decide this is really what you want to do.

I'm preparing for the debt and never living with a ton of money. I've done the math and I'll STILL be more well off than I was growing up below the poverty line. Anything better than that makes me happy. You have to figure out how you want to live though. I'm hoping the AVMA or someone does something about our impossible debt to income ratio one day.