4th year at Minnesota here, copying and pasting an answer I recently wrote about our program:
Overall: I feel like we're a tight-knit community and very supportive of each other, not just within our class but from one class to another. Minnesota works pretty hard to foster the attitude that we're not competing with each other anymore; we had to compete to get here, but now we are all colleagues and need to support one another through the program. I'm quite introverted, so I don't tend to hang out with my classmates outside of school (aside from my close friend group), but people who want to definitely do some fun stuff. I'm one of those freaky people who genuinely loved most of my time in vet school (which isn't to say I wasn't stressed to the max sometimes - I definitely was) and I think a lot of that is due to the collegiality here.
Faculty: The faculty here are, IMO, the best part of the school. I have yet to meet a faculty member who didn't genuinely want us to learn and understand what they teach us, and because everyone is teaching their particular specialty, I feel like they're as excited to teach us as we are to learn. We also do fun things with our faculty - there's an annual trivia night (you get to find out which professors are super competitive people [it's the pathologists, it's always the pathologists]) and there at least used to be an annual skit night, where the first years would do skits making fun of the faculty and the faculty would do skits making fun of them. It was a lot of fun and was very popular when my class did it, but the professor who oversaw skit night has been busy with other aspects of life, so I'm not sure if it's still a thing at this point. There are some new faculty and the structure of first year is different from when I was in the program, so I'm not sure about how some of those early classes run at this point.
Program layout: right now we do the standard 3 years of didactic curriculum, 1 year of clinics. But that being said, we have hands-on labs starting first week of first year, and between our courses and all of the amazing clubs we have, there are a lot of opportunities to do some really cool things. I know you said you're interested in exotics/wildlife, and I'm not really involved with that stuff but I know our zoo med (it's actually zoo, exotics, avian, and wildlife) club has done some crazy cool wetlabs like fish surgeries. We have a mix of traditional lecture-based and problem-based learning. One course during 3rd year is exclusively PBL and it was my favorite class of vet school even though it's an area of medicine that I'm not heading into. I genuinely loved that class and got so much out of it. I've gotten a lot of hands-on experience right out of the gate, but I'm the type of person who will awkwardly follow faculty around and ask if I can shadow them until they say yes to make me go away. We do track, but it really doesn't come into play until second semester of 3rd year (so right before clinics). We have some exotics integrated into other courses and have an exotics handling lab at the end of first year that I really enjoyed.
Clubs: holy wow there are so many clubs, if you have an interest in something, we probably have a club or 3 that would suit you!
Personal pros:
1.) We don't have a dress code.
2.) All of our lectures are livestreamed and recorded, which is super swell for study purposes.
3.) We have a lot of exams, which I like because it helps me focus my studying and also means that we have a little bit of a buffer if we have an off day. You get used to it and it really can help you prioritize what you need to study for that day/week.
4.) The research opportunities being at a huge public university with so many professional programs on one campus are insanely good.
5.) We have a raptor center right across from the small animal hospital, so if birds are your thing, there are a lot of chances to see them over there. I am afraid of birds. I have been in the raptor center 1 time. It was still pretty cool.
6.) While we don't see exotics or wildife on campus, the Wildlife Rehab Center of Minnesota is literally 10 minutes away and welcomes DVM students as volunteers or for rotations during 4th year. They see TONS of cases each year!
7.) COL is cheaper than some cities (caveat: I'm from the NYC area, every city is cheaper than that).
8.) Heavy caseload - our hospital sees 45-50,000 cases a year between the small and large animal hospitals!
Personal cons:
1.) The weather here kind of stinks sometimes
2.) Minnesota drivers are literally the worst drivers I've ever encountered.
3.) Tuition is expensive for OOS.
Why am I here: I love the Midwest. Research opportunities were incredibly important to me, as a dual degree student, and MN is one of the only programs to have a vet school and a med school on the same campus, and might be the only one to have a designated comprehensive cancer center on top of all of that. That was HUGE for me. But honestly, the decision for me was really made by talking to the student ambassadors when I was here for my interviews (DVM and PhD have separate interviews). The student ambassadors really impressed upon me that it's a big family here, that it's not a competitive environment, and that they were genuinely happy to be here and be representing their school. It made me want to be a student ambassador. You'll get a great education no matter where you go - but MN just struck me as somewhere I could see myself spending 8 years and being really happy - and so far, I have been.
