ISU grad here, but I'm small animal GP, not equine. I know a couple of classmates who went on to equine internships, and two people who are doing equine surgical residencies. ISU has an active AAEP chapter as well, and they hold a castration clinic every year that you can start participating in your first year. AAEP organizes the equine ICU on-call list and foal watch list every year, sign up for as few or as many shifts as you're willing to take. There are also equine hospital rounds you can attend weekly starting first year. The hospital has jobs for students as well.
For courses, there's a farrier elective and an equine surgery elective, in addition to the usual equine med that's covered in the core curriculum. The surgery elective is only open to 3rd years, but I think you can take farrier before that.
For 4th year rotations at the school, there's med, surgery, dentistry, farrier, and field services. There is an equine-only therio rotation, but during the slow months, the therio rotations are collapsed into a single service that does all species large and small. I highly recommend optho as well, as a good portion of my patients on my optho rotation were horses and none of my rotation-mates were equine people so I took most of the equine cases and got to place a couple of SPL lines. We had 3 surgical residents (1 equine only, 2 equine/food animal), two medical residents, and a medical intern when I was taking rotations. Mixed animal people like me were only required to take one equine rotation, but I took both med and surgery and I'm glad I did. I got more hands-on surgical experience on my equine rotation than my small animal surgery rotations. I actually got to do a couple of laceration repairs, and scrubbed in on colics, dental braces application, and arthroscopy and do more than just act as an extra set of hands for holding things (like in small animal med). Probably could have done more, but I took NAVLE during my rotation so I'll admit I wasn't the most motivated of students in terms of caseload. One of my rotation-mates was going for an internship, so I think she did all the joint blocks for lameness evaluations since the rest of us were slackers. And we also saw a load of percherons that week for lameness, and I'm just a lil bit afraid of them because I'm small. I never would have guessed how much equine lameness evaluations would help me evaluate limping dogs now that I'm out in practice, but the equine surgeons taught me so much about gait assessment.
I think you can get a great education at either school.
@cheval12 What are the factors you're considering in your decision?
