help me choose between two experiences (lab animal / shelter)? :)

[bluesails]

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Just wondered if I could get some feedback on a choice I have to make! It's looking like I have two places I could work in May and June (before a summer course I'm taking, basically), both unpaid (but that's all right for my situation right now) and both around my college, which is great because it's easy to get housing and I'd get to see friends that are taking classes around then. I don't *officially* have one of them down yet, but after a phone interview with them they basically said they'd contact me after making sure they had the resources to train me as a tech during those dates.

One of them is an internship at the Animal Care and Use Program for the research labs at my university and at its affiliated med school. I would be working with 2 lab animal vets and 3 vet techs (I'm guessing mostly with the vet techs) and doing tech-like duties like cleaning cages, feeding, etc. but also getting to shadow the vets on rounds and helping them treat animals in case of infections etc. Mostly mice, but once every 2 weeks or so they do a larger animal surgery (ex: pigs, sheep); right now they're doing some research on kidney transplants and are using pigs for it, so I'd be able to watch those surgeries. The animal facility is easy for me to get to by public transport, and the hours are very flexible - about 8.5 hours a day but I can basically negotiate how many days a week I want to come in. My main worry is that I won't have enough to do with 3 techs already there, but perhaps people who've worked in lab animal med can enlighten me.

The other is an internship at the local humane society where I'd basically be a hospital tech. In the mornings I'd do your standard feeding, cleaning stuff, and then the vet would come in and do rounds and treatments. In the afternoons I'd work with the vet on more serious medical cases in the non-adoptable animals. The humane society is open admission, so the vet made it clear that I'd see a lot of interesting medical cases, and that I should be prepared to work. I told her that I would be glad to get as much experience as I could. 🙂 I don't know what the hours are like yet (this is the one I'm waiting on), but my problem is that I can't reach this place by public transport and I don't own a car or a US driver's license (I'm international). So I would have to come up with some carpool / rideshare with friends, or I was thinking of asking their internship coordinator if she knew of a rideshare / carpool at the place itself.

What do you guys think? Right now it also kind of depends on whether I can actually get to the humane society, but assuming transportation works out etc., can you help me out with picking between these two?

A little background: most of my experience has been in equine, some in wildlife, and a little bit in small animal. No lab animal experience. A small bit of research experience. No shelter experience except like a couple of spay neuter days where I sat with the cats waking up. I am slightly more interested in shelter medicine just because of the prospect of working with cats and dogs and learning more about shelters, but I am very intrigued by the lab animal opportunity because I know nothing about LAM.

 

[Jinglemuffin]

Depends what your interests are! The lab animal one sounds a bit more unique to me? And unique is good for your vet school applications. If it's more convenient too, and they're both unpaid.. I'd lean that way. But it's your decision- if you feel like shelter med is your passion, or that you will see more actual cases and get more hands-on experience, that could be a way to go.

What year are you in college? Would you have the opportunity to do either of these in the future, like next summer? If you only have a short time til you apply, I'd hedge a bet that lab animal work would be a nice final addition to your application. Shelter opportunities are generally easier to get involved with.

 

[dooleypuppy]

If i was you, I would try and do both! I did that, did like three days at one three days at the other. But if you cant do both then I would say the lab animal. It sets you apart and while it seems tedious I think it looks good on an app. Really though you can't go wrong. And if you take one see if you can shadow the other for hours.

 

[Easnadh]

I personally would choose the research experience. Not as many applicants have lab animal experience, while almost all have small animal/shelter. Just something to consider for diversifying your application 🙂

 

[jhupup]

Gonna put in a vote for shelter work, because that's where the majority of my experience comes from, but I think it also depends on the organization and how you approach it. Most of the pre-vet people who volunteered at my local shelter did basic things like cleaning cages, holding for exams, restocking supplies, and that's where I started off too. But after I got a feel for the place, I started asking the techs to teach me things - how to administer meds, auscultate for heart/lung sounds, run and read fecals, ear and skin cytologies, how to draw blood. The techs were eager to teach me, since the more I learned, the more help I could be to them (and I found the techs are usually more patient and willing to teach than the vets themselves). After about a year or so, there was an opening for a paid vet tech position, and I was offered it right off the bat, so I ended working as a vet tech at this shelter, having learned everything just from volunteering. That ended up being over 1000 vet experience hours for my app, got two good rec letters out of it, plus I gained a really strong understanding of not just shelter medicine itself, but everything else that affects it (the community, interaction with kennel and behavior departments, outreach, fundraising, triage protocols, working with other local shelters and rescues) simply because there's a huge difference between being a volunteer and being in a position where you're held responsible and accountable for tasks. I think my in depth experience with shelter med helped my application a lot, and probably contributed in some part to scholarship offers.

But all shelters and all research labs are different, it really depends on what you'll be allowed to do, how the techs and doctors feel about teaching (I've met some of both that refused to acknowledge my presence), and how much you want to learn. Some of our pre-vet volunteers have been at the shelter longer than I have but still mostly do cage cleaning and re-stocking - still counts as vet experience technically but it's a different experience. And some of them have only been there for a few weeks and want to learn and ask questions, and have already started learning some basic tasks. On the flip side though, do remember that if you're volunteering at shelter, you're primarily there to help the techs, doctors and kennel staff, not just to further your own skills. We've had some volunteers that came in and only wanted to do the cool stuff like draw blood right off the bat, and never helped clean or restock (which is a big part of shelter work too). Nothing quite like coming in, seeing a huge stack of dirty dishes in the sink and one of the other volunteers sitting around playing on her phone cause there weren't any exams going on at the time.