Experience and shadowing questions

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latetothegame

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I'm a freshman non-trad student who is starting to work on accruing animal/vet hours. I also work, so I have the (comparatively modest) goal of 1000 hours of combined animal/vet experience by the time I apply the first time. I've started volunteering 3 hours a week at an animal shelter in the vet clinic area. My job is cleaning up after animals and making sure everyone has food and water and a clean litter box and all that. I picked this position rather than looking after the adoption-ready animals because it puts me in the clinic area.

The shelter allows one person at a time to shadow as often as they like, pending space, during the first half of the day when the doctor does surgeries. If I'm watching surgeries or shadowing a vet, but not assisting, does this count as "veterinary experience"?

I'm also wondering if it's useful on a vet school application to have shadowing experiences with a number of different small animal/exotic vets. I was thinking of trying to shadow vets in my area that run specialty practices, like eye car or cancer, as well as an avian/exotic practice or two. If I only have 10 hours or so with many different vets, does that make me look noncommittal, or is it good to show variety? I think most of my hours will be in small animal in one way or another, but I'm happy to make those hours diverse.

In another thread, someone mentioned that Cornell requires a letter of documentation from every single experience you want them to count. What kind of letter would I want to be collecting from shadowed vets, exactly? Do other schools have requirements about documentation/proof that I should be aware of before I do anything else?

Finally, I'm going to have to travel to get horse/farm animal experience, and possibly for wildlife as well. Does anyone have suggestions for animal sanctuaries or programs that are friendly to pre-vet students who would want to do a full time week of volunteering rather than an afternoon every week? It can be anywhere in the country, but hopefully located reasonably near to an airport. (I gather that RAVS does horse clinics, but only abroad?)

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Yes, anytime you are shadowing or working under the supervision of the vet, it's considered vet experience. All your hours do not have to be directly working with the vet, I counted my vet assistant experience as vet experience and about 1/4 of my time was spent caring for the animals while the doctor slept (it was an emergency clinic) or cleaning and looking after the animals just occasionally to make sure everyone was OK. Most of my time was spent restraining animals, monitoring surgery, giving injections, getting TPRs, etc. so I counted it all as vet experience.

Diversity is good, but look into your programs because some like depth of experience more than breadth and others prefer breadth over depth. So, research your schools. Remember you'll need a letter of recommendation from at least one of the vets you work with, so you want to work/shadow there long enough for them to get to know you and be able to write a strong letter for you. Also, some schools, like Ohio State require a vet to sign a verification form for you. OSU has an 80 hour verification form a vet must sign stating you worked with that one vet (or clinic) for at least 80 hours.

Sounds like your off to a good start with the experience. Do you have an idea of what kind of vet you want to be? I'd say you'd want to get the majority of your experience in the field you are most interested in, if you have one. For example, if you say you want to be an equine vet and only like 1/8 of your experience comes from there, you'll leave the ad coms going :confused:, horses really, what got you interested in that.

Good luck to you. You have plenty of time as a freshman, I'd focus on your summers as key times to get your experience in.
 
Yes, anytime you are shadowing or working under the supervision of the vet, it's considered vet experience. All your hours do not have to be directly working with the vet, I counted my vet assistant experience as vet experience and about 1/4 of my time was spent caring for the animals while the doctor slept (it was an emergency clinic) or cleaning and looking after the animals just occasionally to make sure everyone was OK. Most of my time was spent restraining animals, monitoring surgery, giving injections, getting TPRs, etc. so I counted it all as vet experience.

Diversity is good, but look into your programs because some like depth of experience more than breadth and others prefer breadth over depth. So, research your schools. Remember you'll need a letter of recommendation from at least one of the vets you work with, so you want to work/shadow there long enough for them to get to know you and be able to write a strong letter for you. Also, some schools, like Ohio State require a vet to sign a verification form for you. OSU has an 80 hour verification form a vet must sign stating you worked with that one vet (or clinic) for at least 80 hours.

Sounds like your off to a good start with the experience. Do you have an idea of what kind of vet you want to be? I'd say you'd want to get the majority of your experience in the field you are most interested in, if you have one. For example, if you say you want to be an equine vet and only like 1/8 of your experience comes from there, you'll leave the ad coms going :confused:, horses really, what got you interested in that.

Good luck to you. You have plenty of time as a freshman, I'd focus on your summers as key times to get your experience in.

Thanks.

My plan is to be a cat specialist eventually. As a city person, I have no easy access to farm animals and wildlife, so I know I won't have a lot of experiences in those areas. There are multiple clinics in my area that do birds and exotics, so hopefully one of them will let me shadow for a week or two.

Volunteering and shadowing at an animal shelter is going to be my main source of hours, and I'm hoping to get a letter of recommendation from a shelter vet. I'm also looking for short full time programs that I could do once a year, like RAVS. (Crossing my fingers I'll get accepted to do that this year.)

Over the next 4-ish years (I'm taking 5 years to do undergrad because I also have a good job I'm not ready to quit), I think it's reasonable to plan for at least 600 hours at the shelter, and a boost of 400 hours from some full time shadowing or volunteering at other places/programs. (2-3 weeks of full time work per year, plus a weekly 3 hour shelter shift.)
 
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Sounds like a great plan. Many schools look for experience in your area of interest, not necessarily experience in everything. I only had 6 hours working with an equine vet. I did have about 300 hours working at a petting zoo with horses as well, but I have no other large animal experience and I got into vet school, so not having much large animal experience isn't the end of the world.
 
Finally, I'm going to have to travel to get horse/farm animal experience, and possibly for wildlife as well. Does anyone have suggestions for animal sanctuaries or programs that are friendly to pre-vet students who would want to do a full time week of volunteering rather than an afternoon every week? It can be anywhere in the country, but hopefully located reasonably near to an airport. (I gather that RAVS does horse clinics, but only abroad?)

You can try looking for a therapeutic riding school where you'll be required to groom, tack up and definately lead the horses in classes/lessons. Many non-horsey people can get hours in this way... the horses are generally really easy to work with and its a great place to learn basic horsey stuff (that way if you end up shadowing with an equine vet you'll have some basic knowledge of horses... not to mention it will help when you're in vet school- any basic knowledge will help in some way!!)

Also, on another note... certain schools/people tend to classify horses different from "large animal/production animals". Horses tend to fall more or less into the 'companion animal' category (for all intents and purposes), where as your cows, swine, chickens, sheep etc will go into a category together. Some schools don't even consider horse experience regarded as LA experience, compared to working on a dairy for example.

ETA:
on the topic of wildlife, you might be surprised what you can find in your own area. There are wild animals in the city, don't forget! Have you tried looking up your local wildlife rescue? I'm from the city too and I was able to get wildlife, horses and exotics within and around my city. Had I stayed in my home city, I would have easily been able to get some LA experience as well (but stuff happened and I ended up on a plane to the other side of the world, etc). If you look hard enough... you never know whats hiding around the corner... ;)
 
As for hours, I spoke with an admissions advisor after I applied the first time and we talked about my lack of variety in animal experience. she recommended a minimum of at least 40 hours in the different areas. While the majority of my hours are small animal and research (2000+), I spent time between cycles getting at least 40 in large, exotic, food and other speciality areas to make me more well-rounded. Some I got more than 40, some I stopped right at 40. I work full-time so I had to work with what I could really commit to. It worked in my favor as I now have two acceptances so far this application cycle.
 
You can try looking for a therapeutic riding school where you'll be required to groom, tack up and definately lead the horses in classes/lessons. Many non-horsey people can get hours in this way...

I had a horse phase from about 10 to 13, and I took English-style lessons on weekends. I would still say I feel comfortable around horses, but I didn't think "I used to ride as a pre-teen" would be considered sufficient experience for a vet school application.

on the topic of wildlife, you might be surprised what you can find in your own area. There are wild animals in the city, don't forget! Have you tried looking up your local wildlife rescue? I'm from the city too and I was able to get wildlife, horses and exotics within and around my city.

Yeah, I'm sure there's something. Someone must look after the injured pigeons and occasional raccoons. I think I'm going to have to look the hardest to get decent wildlife hours, followed by farm animals.
 
I had a horse phase from about 10 to 13, and I took English-style lessons on weekends. I would still say I feel comfortable around horses, but I didn't think "I used to ride as a pre-teen" would be considered sufficient experience for a vet school application.



Yeah, I'm sure there's something. Someone must look after the injured pigeons and occasional raccoons. I think I'm going to have to look the hardest to get decent wildlife hours, followed by farm animals.

I'm not sure what you mean by your first point but I was just trying to give some suggestions to get horse experience. Riding horses is considered animal experience which, if you haven't noticed, is a suggested requirement for a vet school application. Your first post didn't give any hint that you had any horse experience, so I was just trying to suggest some ideas.

Pigeons and raccoons are wildlife, so not sure where you're from but if you were hoping to find experience with lions and elephants then yeah you'll have to look hard for that. Good luck finding something near an airport.
 
I'm not sure what you mean by your first point but I was just trying to give some suggestions to get horse experience. Riding horses is considered animal experience which, if you haven't noticed, is a suggested requirement for a vet school application. Your first post didn't give any hint that you had any horse experience, so I was just trying to suggest some ideas.

Why indeed, I had actually noticed that animal experience is a "suggested requirement" for vet school, I'm a real genius like that.
 
Why indeed, I had actually noticed that animal experience is a "suggested requirement" for vet school, I'm a real genius like that.

Dude I don't know what your problem is but your original post asked for ideas about how to get "horse/farm experience". I was just trying to suggest a few ideas and help you out.

Maybe you didn't understand what I meant by my first post, but 'therapeutic riding' isn't horse riding lessons for YOU, its for kids/people with disabilities and its a good way to learn the basics of horse care if you don't already know how to do that stuff (which you didn't mention you already know since you did horse riding lessons previously). So chill out for a second and realize that I wasn't trying to be snotty or rude in my initial post, I was being legit.
 
Are you sure you wanna be a vet student? With that attitude you'd fit right in with the med students over in another part of the forum! :laugh:
 
Lostbunny: I completely understand what you're saying, but you can ignore that and keep talking down to me like I'm a feeble imbecile. Carry on without me, kids.
 
I'm not familiar with the requirements of multiple hours of experience over all the veterinary fields. I was accepted into multiple schools in my first application year, and I only had small animal emergency volunteer experience and wildlife experience. I would suggest focusing on what interests you, and maybe getting hours in just a few areas where you can develop strong relationships people who will give you good recommendations.

If you do want wildlife experience, I strongly suggest looking into internships at wildlife rehabilitation centers. I traveled from MT to Oregon for a live-in internship for 8wks last summer and was able to log a ton of hours of hands-on treatment in a short time. Not sure if you can get away from your job for that long, but it's a good way to get some of that experience requirement out of the way quickly.

Focusing on your grades is also a hugely important factor, since many schools pre-screen applicants into different ranking groups based on their GPA's.

Good luck to you!
 
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