Did you struggle between different careers?

[Riscatto]

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Hi, sorry if this is not the right thread, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the site.

I’ve been struggling on and off with determining my path. I’ve always loved vet med, I have my vet tech degree, unfortunately I was told I’m too compassionate so I lost all confidence and I never clicked with the environment or people if that makes sense, but I never cared for general practice. I do like working with horses, cattle, zoo, etc.

I’ve been working around people and have learned that I like helping people and I enjoy medicine, but I never truly thought of human med.

Each has there pros and cons, of course vet has high debt with low salary. So did anyone struggle with deciding and how did you make ends meet with vet med? Or how did you decide between the two of you thought about it? Thanks for your time.

 

[deleted955608]

Get experience in human med before you decide one path over the other. Both have their pros and cons. On a personal level, my husband is a human doctor and would not re-do all over again if he had a choice. Like I said, pros and cons to both.

 

[deleted676737]

I agree with @ArizonaSkye --- try to shadow/volunteer/work in human med for a little while and see whether or not that clicks with you before making a decision (as a vet tech, you obviously have vet experience, but it's not super clear from your post if you've got any in human med?). If you find that you do enjoy what you see in the human realm, I would honestly at least very seriously consider going for that over vet med. Both paths require exorbitant amounts of time, dedication, and money, but at least with human med, the pay is much more commiserate with the debtload than it is in vet med, meaning that you may actually have a high enough salary to make a serious dent in that debtload versus vet med where you may struggle simply to cover interest, let alone the principal.

You can make decent money as a vet eventually, especially if you go into specialty, but still nowhere near what an MD or DO with the same amount of experience will tend to make. And those first couple of decades dealing with the debt on an average newly graduated vet salary will be really, really rough.

I was all into vet med toward the end of undergrad. Went to vet school for two years, then ended up leaving and am now working in a human hospital in critical care. I very much like my job and, to be completely truthful, if I could do things over again knowing what I know now and having struggled immensely with paying back the just-over-six-figure debt that I have, I wouldn't go back to vet school. Even if I was guaranteed that I would actually finish and graduate, I still don't think that I would. I'm happy with what I'm doing now and I don't need any sort of professional degree to do it. The pay would be enough to support me if I didn't have that enormous albatross of vet school debt around my neck. If I did decide on more schooling, I might choose med school instead. But hindsight's 20/20.

 

[NITRAS]

I'm not a vet. I never had any interest in vet medicine. Its going to be difficult to live with a couple hundred thousand in student loans and making 100kish. Realize that most vets make less than that for a while. Pretty much any medical doctor can make 2-3 hundred thousand one year out of residency as an employed physician. There are also other ways, such as NP or PA that get you making better money than most vets a lot quicker.

The bottom line is that, personally, if medicine paid as little as vet medicine, I'd never have went to med school because it would have been a boat anchor and dictated decisions in my life for decades. I would have found another way that my skills and passion could have provided for my family.

As I'm a little older, I think its a dumb idea to go into $300k-400k+ in debt to go to med school. If you ever met someone who failed their STEP exams so much they were kicked out. . . . you realize what a bad position they are in. I also think that income based ultimately encourage students to make bad decisions and poor professional decisions even after college.

Good luck.