Logging vet hours

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Armymutt25A

Cranky VSST OIC
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Do any of you count professional development time as part of your experience hours? By this I mean time spent with the vet minus any animals, just talking about the field? If the purpose of gaining experience is to ensure you know what you are getting into, it makes sense that frank discussions would count for experience. There's a lot more involved than just treating animals. I did a controlled drug inventory the other day. Not sure if the civilian side has to do something similar, but the requirements are a disinterested commissioned officer. I fit the bill. Disinterested in this case means that I don't go to jail if several vials of morphine are missing. To me, this is experience that will come in handy in the area of vet med I want to pursue.

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I count all hours that I have worked at a veterinary office as veterinary experience. Not only would it be very difficult to record the exact number of hours that I was working with and on patients, what you said is true, there's more to being a vet than just examining the animals. In my day-to-day I do a lot of lab maintenance, ordering, communicating with clients, inventory, drug log, radiology log, and cleaning. I also really enjoy speaking with the vets I work with especially about animals who have an interesting case that I'm not familiar with. I don't see why you couldn't count this as veterinary experience.
 
I'm counting total time spent, too. When riding along with an equine vet, hitting a stopwatch every time I got out of and back into the truck would be a monumental pain in the butt :laugh:. I spent three years working in law firms keeping track of my time in six-minute increments... I have no desire whatsoever to relive that phase of my life.
 
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