Meh. I know what you're saying, and I don't really disagree, but ... I think putting it that way can kinda scare some pre-vets who don't have a lot of context for interpreting what you're saying. It's not like VMCAS gives you paragraphs to write about your experiences, so you really don't have to say a lot about what you've experienced. Maybe it comes up in the interview, but more likely than not at most schools doing behavioral interviews it doesn't. At least, not in a grilling "describe what you saw or else!" kinda way. Nobody expects you to be able to give a step-by-step of a spay surgery just because you observed it as a pre-vet. I mean, I had a few years volunteering in canine rehab - I wrote two sentences in VMCAS about it. I had a couple hundred hours of shadowing - pretty much just said "Yo, shadowed here, watched a GP vet do GP vet things." (Ok, sure, I was more formal about describing it, but.... it's not like it was all technical or in-depth.)
I know the standard SDN line for pre-vets is "quality trumps quantity" but honestly, I'm not sure that's really true. I think it's just something we say because we've talked ourselves into believing it without any real evidence that it's true. I think either one can be just fine - depending on how well your experiences support your personal statement which is supported by your eLORs, etc. I think the successful applicants are the ones where the whole application - experiences, personal statements, eLORs, academic background - all tie together to support each other. The unsuccessful applicants (other than the ones with obvious and irreconcilable deficiencies, like a 2.6 GPA or missing pre-reqs or ....) are the ones where the pieces of the puzzle don't fit together to give one big unified picture that says 'amazing vet student'. It's the ones that have 1000 hours of SA shadowing but say they want to be a zoo vet, and their vet eLOR is from an equine vet they shadowed for 25 hours.....
I liked what
@WildZoo said:
It's true, to really know you'd have to talk to the people who do the evaluation. We do a lot of talking out our rear ends here on SDN about what makes a good applicant. But I suspect what you'll find is that even within a single school there is variation depending on which people look at your application and score it.
But it's not even necessary to 'build up' from shadowing. I certainly didn't. (Although I did have a couple years of volunteering at our teaching hospital in canine rehab.) But I didn't have a single 'paid' hour of experience on my application. I had never poked anything with a needle. I don't think I had ever listened to anything with a stethoscope. So don't get discouraged when you hear people talking about all these gee-whiz cool experiences they have as pre-vets: it's cool and neat and can be super useful for motivation, learning, and fun, but almost none of it is
necessary to get into vet school.
So
@301589 ,just go get as much experience as you can. 30-40 hours or so in a few areas that you don't think you have much interest in (like dairy medicine and equine med if you plan to be a SA vet, for example) and then get as many (300+ or so on the low end, 500+ is better) as you can in the area you are interested in. Don't worry too much about whether it's "hands on" or just "watching" - that's not an important deal. Build connections so that you have a few vets who can write you really strong eLORs saying "this person is a no-brainer to get into vet school." And if you are going back to school for pre-reqs - get all A's. Don't screw around with "Oh, a B is ok in this class because I don't want to work harder and this class is tough and I don't like the teacher anyway." Push yourself for A's. Just do it.
And then don't quit building experience when you submit your application. That way, if you don't get accepted, you haven't wasted time that could have been used for building more hours.
For example, my interviewers heard I like avian medicine, so they asked how certain procedures happen in birds.
