I never did post here, did I? Huh.
Anyway, I'm pretty boring. xD Just a Caucasian 21 y/o female (22 in June!) living near Kansas City, MO. I'm an on-campus student in Joplin for undergrad, though. So, yeah, I'm basically your traditional run-of-the-mill vet school applicant. Normally, I'd be applying this c/o 2019 cycle, but a major change and some poor grades my first year are holding me back... my situation's weird in that I excel in all of my upper-division science courses, but due to my relative indifference my freshman year - and trust me, I'm really kicking myself for it - I have a few rough patches in gen ed courses. It's stupid and it's my fault, but my GPA really got a bad start as a consequence. In a way, then, I guess an extra year to further bolster my application may help. Of course, being that my IS (Mizzou) bases a crazy amount of their decision on cum GPA and they average retakes, I may very well be screwed. Though I guess there's no harm in trying. I also plan on applying to K-State and Iowa State - two schools whose procedures, thankfully, would play more to my strengths than Mizzou would. I've been studying and practicing quite a bit for the GRE, too, which I will be taking in early June.
With that in mind, I'm most likely going to apply next summer for the c/o 2020, though I've toyed with the idea of waiting until the c/o 2021 cycle just to have a little extra time to raise my GPA up more. I'm not quite sure yet.
Anyway, I actually started undergrad as a Spanish major, simply because I didn't think I had the raw intelligence necessary to do well in a science program. Needless to say, I floundered around a lot because I realized that it wasn't really what I wanted to do. After taking a General Biology course for a gen ed and receiving an A, my interest in vet med was rekindled; I switched over to a BS in Biology, started getting
much higher marks, and haven't looked back since.
🙂
My experiences, unfortunately, aren't quite as extensive as they could be due to a somewhat late start in the field. I've got roughly 300 hours of small animal between several clinics, one of which is a holistic/alternative practice. I do have some zoo animal already set in stone for this summer - will probably wind up with about 30 hours or so - along with a few days with a large animal/equine veterinarian. I realize that this is an odd spread of experience, but I'm not dead-set on one area of vet med yet, so I'm trying to keep an open mind and get hours in as many different capacities as possible.
Outside of vet med, I've had some cool animal-related experiences through our campus's Biology Club. For example, we worked in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Conservation and a meat processing company to age and record population data on White-Tailed Deer that had been hunted, which was really neat. During high school, I went on a Spanish Club trip to Costa Rica where, while we mostly did human-related volunteer work, we also had a few hours taking a course on sea turtle conservation and actually got to do some cool things with that. I also work an annual low-cost rabies vax and microchip clinic, as volunteer at several animal shelters and other similar things. In terms of other work, I just left the restaurant I had been working at for three years as a crew manager (which helped develop good interaction skills for vet med, I hope!). Starting this upcoming fall semester, I will be a paid Biology tutor through our university's success center.
I also enjoy digital art, web design, and language study. I learned the hard way that I can't really compose myself in a traditional academic foreign language course, but I still love to translate both Spanish and Japanese - which was my original minor alongside my Spanish major - media in my own free time. I used to write a lot, too, but it takes so much time and effort that I just can't get myself engaged in it anymore.
🙁
Speaking of...
Fellow NaNoWriMo winner here!
I used to do NaNoWriMo! It's awesome seeing that so many members here also did it! I only won two years (2007 and 2008), but it was always fun trying to meet the finish line of 50,000. I'd never even thought about including on my application; I suppose it couldn't hurt, anyway.
😛