How early can you do a summer externship?

[Cornish]

---

Members do not see this ad.

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned in my previous thread about zoo med I am a first year vet student. As I approach my first summer I have toyed with the idea of doing a summer externship to help me figure out what type of vet I might want to be. I thought that externships were for people near their final years, but when I was working at Angell there were externs from every year (even first!). They basically spent a few weeks shadowing the hospital and one of them parlayed that relationship into a internship, by doing extenships every summer at the same place.

Has anyone else done an externship like this? I am trying to figure this out now because lets say I want to do a rotation in my final year at a zoo I'll need to plan that out a year in advance, but I won't even know if thats for me since I have no experience in the field.

Any advice would be great. Thank you.

 

[ovc2012]

I am pretty sure your externships are different than what we call externships at our school. Our externship is in 3rd year and we have to do it in a mixed practice for 8 weeks and then we are free to do whatever else we want the next 8 weeks (eg: going to shadow different vets in different provinces/states). But going back to your externship, do you mean something for the summer? I think you could probably start as early as after 1st year. I know a few of my friends including myself are doing voluntary projects abroad in Africa this summer for 3-8 weeks working at a wildlife rehabilitation centre. I know my friend also worked at the zoo with a vet for the summer after her first year of vet school. She got paid for it though. It was like a "summer job" for her.

 

[Cornish]

I did mean summer-type work. Those programs would be a good idea...did you go through a particular organization?