Current DVM 3rd year student - Can't settle and considering MD

[Bainne]

---

Members don't see this ad.

First off, I'm actually a MVB student because vets don't get to call themselves doctors over here. We've free fees here so apart from registration so I'll come out of college with zero debt. If I was to start again I'd have to pay fees for however many years of vet I have completed (2, starting my third in a week).

Ever since I was a little kid I thought I wanted to be vet. When it came to applying to college everyone said it'd be perfect for me so I waved off the few that asked me to question it and concentrating on getting in. Even now people tell me how much I must be enjoying my course. But I'm not.

I'm a city girl and anything involving farm life would have come close to the bottom of my choice of careers. We are assessed on grades alone to get into college here so I had no idea what large animal medicine was like. Last semester of last year was 70% large animal health; repro. management for large animals, farm animal management (nutrition, housing, etc). We did an intro to immunology which I did very much enjoy but the rest was torturous. And the semester before we did pharmacology and renal physiology and diuretics which I found very interesting. I was looking forward to next year because we start more clinical stuff but looking at the notes it's still seems to the be the same emphasis on large animals.

I love learning about the physiology, pharmacology and everything else when we're talking about a single animal and doing the best to treat a single animal. I think I might enjoy MD better because it would be exactly that; the medicine plus doing your best with much less (if any) financial constraints. And while owning my own specialist practice (I've a special interest in exotics but that has been waning recently) once appealed to me greatly I now find the idea of working with the same three or four people for the rest of my life a bit boring and find the appeal of a large hospital greater.

I simply can't settle in DVM. This has been bothering me on and off for the last two years and it's affecting my college experience. I sometimes wonder if I'd have a better time studying MD (getting along with people better [I'm sure I'm the only one who is 100% positive they never want to do large animal], enjoying the course more, etc). I do like the variety in vet though, the way you could be dealing with a fracture one hour and an epilepsy case the next but then that goes with specialisation which I'm 100% certain, if I do continue in vet, I want to do. I've know what general practise in a small animal clinic is like and I don't like how much of it is routine vaccinations or routine treatments for common conditions.

There's the issue of money too. I give grinds to high school students now and according to some statistics I'd only earn twice that as a vet for a lot more effort. And prestige. It's harder to get into vet here than it is medicine and yet people have so much more respect for med students and doctors. I'm fortunate to live quite comfortably at the moment (with my parents, admittedly) and I don't want that to change. I also think there's less room for advancement in vet. From what I can find online it tops off at $95,000 here (a lot less than the average doctor makes).

I feel lost. I've forced myself to bury the doubtful thoughts so often I don't even know how to sit back and think the whole thing over in my head. Anyone ever felt similar or have any opinions?

 

[Saffine]

There is a reasonable run down of the pros/cons of med and vet in this Australian forum where several vets are discussing the transition. However student debt and wages are probably out of context in this forum:

http://pagingdr.net/forum/index.php?topic=4293.0;all

 

[Bainne]

Thanks, I'll have a look.

 

[sunshinevet]

Where are you? Your post doesn't make that very clear.

How much veterinary experience do you have? You say you have some SA GP experience, but if you've only seen one clinic it doesnt matter how many hours you have - one clinic is NEVER representative. You say SAGP is routine vaccinations and common conditions, whereas I've seen some extremely complex and unusual things dealt with by GP vets on a frequent basis. The great thing about vet is that you have the freedom to practice pretty much exactly however you want - if you want to do the complex stuff you can, if you dont want to, you dont have to.

How much experience do you have with specialist hospitals? In my experience they tend to be much larger than GP hospitals - the speciality hopsital I currently work at has over 100 staff members across 7 disciplines, and we are not a particularly huge speciality hospital in the scheme of things. Also, depending on which speciality you go into, there can be a huge variety within your cases - especially broad based specialities such as internal medicine, surgery and emergency and critical care. There is definately no repetitive, run of the mill days as a busy specialist with those. Yes there will be some procedures you perform often, but thats exactly the same no matter where you go in healthcare.

Also I think its important to remember that yes while things may seem more LA heavy now, that dies down significantly in the clinical years. For example, at my uni, out of 6 months of core rotations, only 1.5 months are dedicated to LA practice. Pretty disappointing for those who are interested in equine/bovine/ovine/porcine etc in any way...

It sounds like you may have been a little undereducated before making your career choice? Have you spoken to many human doctors/shadowed many human doctors about making the transition? The decision to stay and the decision to go are not ones that can be made from the outside - you need to truly experience the professions to be able to make an informed decision. Otherwise I feel you are very likely to do an MD and come out of it unsatisfied...

 

[peppy]

I'm a human physician. I sometimes wonder if I should have gone to vet school instead. The grass is always greener on the other side. 🙂
I agree with the advice to try to get some shadowing experience to help you get a better sense of what day to day life in human medicine is like. Often I think people have idealized views of what human medicine is like and the reality of it can be quite different.
My perspective on medicine is based on working in the US and it sounds like you're elsewhere, so I'm not sure if I can say much that applies to your situation, however.

 

[Bainne]

Thanks for the replies. Critical analysis of my thoughts is exactly what I need!

I'm in Dublin, Ireland. Sorry. I was reluctant to specify earlier because with only one vet school here I can be identified to the person from the little bit I've said so far but oh well...

Just to be clear, to get in to veterinary here ALL you need our grades. No experience. Not in a vets, in a kennels or in a rescue. In fact, you could have never touched an animal before and you might still get in. In the previous two years we have had to get husbandry experience on farms and kennels (so not necessarily with vets'). My clinical experience starts at Christmas. For the past four years I've worked at a practice on Saturdays that specialise in exotics but also treat dogs and cats. I've done one week LA GP and that's it apart from visiting other vets'. You're right, I don't have much or a variety of experience. But please understand that's not too unusual here. Most people have only spent time at their local practice until CEMS requires them to placement. It is hard to get specialist experience here in Ireland though. I only know of two orthopaedic specialists and both get full up on places a year in advance and will only take 3rd years +. I've applied to one for next summer but I'm waiting to hear back if they're available. I'm more than willing to go abroad if I could organise into one trans-atlantic flight per summer and the visas didn't cost too much and I could find somewhere cheap to stay. I applied to every university in America for an exotic placement (one of the specialities I'd be interested in) next summer but most only take final years or have told me to reapply later. We'll see how that goes.

I really appreciate you telling me what speciality hospitals are like over in Australia. ALL I know from outside of Ireland is from tv shows! Here it's very different though. The biggest vet hospital I know of is the teaching hospital belonging to the university and, although I haven't been in it yet, it seems very limited in what it offers compared to the any of the ones in the US (I researched them over the summer to look for places to do placement abroad). The only other speciality hospital I know of here has only 7 vets listed under staff. I would like to think I can work in Ireland when I'm older...

I'm NOT trying to diss veterinary. It's nothing short of an excellent career. And there are parts of it I still really love. But having had doubtful thoughts for the past year and a half I have to investigate them further and put them to rest one way or the other so they aren't hanging over me for next year.

 

[sunshinevet]

Hi again!

Yep, I fully understand about applying to vet with no animal experience - it is a similar situation here in Australia. Most universities have most students enter straight out of high school based purely on grades, with no veterinary experience. I was lucky that while I came straight from highschool I had a lot of veterinary experience and have continued to gain broad experiences while in vet school. So that part I understand better than most on this site, and have watched many of my friends in similar situations 🙂 (i'm pretty sure there ARE people in my class who have never touched animals! )

While specialty hospitals might be slightly lacking in Ireland, i know there are huge amazing speciality hospitals in the UK which have dozens of doctors and heaps of disciplines. Is there a specific reason your looking straight to the US for rotations and clinic placements? Because there are many hospitals similar in the UK that I know of from people I work with working there etc. Also its important to remember that while 7 vets doesnt sound like a lot, there are a lot more staff members than that - most good speciality hospitals would have 2-3 nurses per doctor, plus kennel hands and receptionists etc. Suddenly you have nearly 30-40 staff members to work with, and you will be working just as closely with nurses as you are with vets. I think its also important to remember that while human medicine is set in a bigger hospital, you will still work within teams that will be relatively small.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that its impossible for you to make this decision now, with only feedback from a message board. You really need to get a wide variety of experiences within the veterinary field, and within the human medical field, before truly being able to make those decisions. I know the system that you're in isnt very supportive of trying to do that, unfortunately. I just know a lot of people in my class have been very disillusioned by the first few years (especially SA focused students) only to be reinvigorated in the last couple. People over here were especially put out by farm prac EMS they had to do etc etc and felt like they were never going to learn anything about small animals - we are now in 4th year and the tables have well and truly turned. (The Aus system is very similar to the UK/ireland system). I just wouldnt want you making a decision to leave and regretting it.

As I've said to other people, its also very possible to hate vet school but love being a vet - and love vet school and hate being a vet. So unfortunately you have to try and seperate the two things and investigate whether or not you are going to love being a vet, versus whether you are just unhappy with vet school.

I hope that last part made sense! 🙂

 

[Saffine]

It seems like a challenging decision. You suggest LA is one issue but these are a minority of vets in most developed countries so I wouldn't worry about that.

You also suggest that you don't like the financial constraints of vet treatments. You pretty much have to specialise to get away from this so that would add another approx. 4 years to training. If there is only one uni in Ireland it would make getting jobs (internships and residencies) in your home country challenging.

On working with a team there is a much higher likelihood of having a larger team working in med but as sunshinevet suggests if you are able to complete the specialist track and get a university job, some vets are able to get into teams.

On the finances, here in Aus human med gets around $AUD200-400k+, avg GP vets around $70k and specialist vets around $130ish depending on specialty. See here http://ausvetnet.wordpress.com/
Also on finances, if deciding on human med the earlier the better to maximise income time once graduated.

On the job variety yes there is probably more variety if you are a GP vet but possibly more challenging medical/surgery cases if you specialise or go to human med.

We see a few in Aus go from vet to med.

 

[azilebeth]

Hi! I too am at UCD and I came through the Graduate Programme so I had thousands of hours of experience. That still doesn't make me feel that veterinary medicine is the best for me. I too HATED that semester. I come from a 100% rural farming background and I did everything in my power to skip farm animal, repro, and nutrition lectures. I know we have a different curriculum than you do until 3rd year (it seems we are now classmates!) but I too loved the pure physiology and anatomy aspects of first semester. And I didn't expect that. I thought I would love field work. I thought I would love what seemed to be more clinical work than earlier classes. But I hated every second of it. And this summer I worked at a top research veterinary center in the US, and I heard about all these other schools that allowed electives and had mandatory rotations in things like exotics and lab animal medicine and allowed you to do independent research for credit.

Unfortunately, that's the nature of the beast in our school. I love it to death, but you are really only meant to graduate as a competent mixed animal rural practice vet. Because that's what everyone does so they just cater to the majority. I certainly don't want anything to do with that, and I have to spend a lot of money and time gaining the experience in the field that I want. And probably 90% of the time I spend at school makes me want to throw the towel in and quit and go into human medicine. Because I've worked at hospitals and loved it. I love the atmosphere, I love the science, and quite frankly the financial opportunities and status is appealing, because sometimes it really frustrates me that veterinary medicine isn't regarded highly enough and because I'm scared of the debt and I have less than some people have (all who don't care in the slightest that they take out the max of public and private loans and have no business skills to actually succeed in working off that debt in a reasonable amount of time without living in their car). But that 10% of me knows that I'm in veterinary medicine for more than the money (haha) and that human medicine, while interesting and fulfilling, would push me back years and would never come with the ethics that veterinary medicine tries* to exemplify. I want to work in a very very small subset of veterinary medicine, but I'm willing to work slightly outside those boundaries as a regular speciality surgeon or a regular laboratory animal veterinarian. And I'm willing to work in industry and business and government until I find a place for me. But that took a lot of soul searching, and a lot of crying over textbooks, and a lot of time researching the field, and a lot of faith.

I think you need to really figure out where you want to go in veterinary medicine. Even just reading about every possible path, especially non-traditional ones. And then when clinics come up, or summers, you can spend the elective blocks at different places that maybe fit your interests and provide a better future outlook. As we will graduate from Ireland, we can work ANYWHERE! So look into Europe, look into North America, look into the UK. Find me at school and we can complain 🙂. And there are probably a lot more of us. And we just have to make the first step and say - hey, we're going to fight for veterinary medicine and not just farm animal medicine.

(sorry for the essay - but seriously, I hear ya)