Not feeling ready to be a doctor

[Babyvet24]

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Hi all.

I just graduated this May and am about to start working. I took some time off to have a break and feel ready to start working. I recently started reviewing some things and am not remembering nearly as much as I thought I would. I am now feeling incredibly under prepared. I had gone through school with the plan of being mixed animal/mostly large animal but have had to pivot to only small animal for my first year(s). Thus I didn’t have as many small animal focused 4th year courses (dermatology, dentistry, IM). I feel like I am going to have to look everything up all of the time and not know the answer most of the time.

I am not feeling ready to be a doctor and am freaking out a bit.

Any advice or encouragement is welcomed.

 

[Trilt]

I'm almost eight years out and still look stuff up daily, don't stress about that at all.

I was exotics/zoo focused and took a ton of those rotations instead of typical SA stuff. It never was a problem for me, you just have to do some personal learning on the fly! I highly recommend VIN's getting through the day/night courses and having a couple classmates or vets you know available for texting.

The environment of your first job is also important - are you going to be alone? or are you going to have another doctor to consult with routinely? (when I have new grads with me, I expect them to have questions! and get a little nervous if they're not asking things, tbh).

Basically, it's very normal to be stressed about a first job, but you'll likely be surprised how much you have retained from school... and for everything else, there's the internet, books and friends. ☺️

 

[SkiOtter]

Basically gonna echo what trilt said. I’m in SA GP and only 2 years out, but I also still look up stuff on a very regular basis. No one expects you to remember everything. I even will tell clients that I need to go look up some stuff about whatever symptoms they’re seeing and what I find on my exam if I’m not immediately sure what’s going on with their pet. If it’s something I can’t easily find an answer to in my notes (all my PowerPoints are in a google drive that I can easily search through on my phone at work) or on vin, I either ask the other doctor I’m with or I text some friends. There are also a bunch of vet-only Facebook groups where people ask questions about cases all the time. You can either search the group to see if someone else had something similar or you can ask a question yourself and get answers from other vets (which often a picture (even unrelated to the case) with the post seems to appease the Facebook algorithm more and push it to more people’s feeds vs just a wall of text). Also I definitely am NOT great at reading Rads and always have a second set of eyes on my Rads to see if they see anything I’m missing.
Sometimes my techs ask me questions (occasionally about their own pets or sometimes just disease processes or what a blood value means because a couple are doing PennFoster and see some stuff in their classes) and I will straight up tell them “I have no clue but we’ll look it up.” They have told me multiple times that they appreciate that I don’t make them feel dumb for asking what they consider stupid questions and sometimes that it’s something I don’t even know and then we look it up together.
When I first started my job, I had longer appointment times than the other doctors to help with giving me extra time to look things up and do my records after the appt before my next one got there so I wasn’t stuck for hours after appointments finishing my records. My clinic has a sheet of paper with patient info for each patient and it travels with them from the front desk to the exam room and I write quick little notes to jog my memory when I do my record about abnormal things on exam (otherwise I WILL forget) and I definitely recommend doing something similar. Also helps me know that I’ve done all my charts when I don’t have any of those pages left at the end of the day.
They also had me only see wellness visits for the first few weeks to ease myself into being a vet. Then it was adding in a few easier sick visits like ear infections and acute vomiting/diarrhea, but still mostly wellness. Once I had a handle on that stuff and felt more confident, they started adding more sick visits to my schedule. I also was initially assigned one of the more experienced techs for all my appointments who had been in vetmed and at this clinic for YEARS. She would often let me know things that the other vets generally do for XYZ (like what antibiotic other doctors usually reach for, if they usually did any injections while doing SQ fluids that I didn’t think about for vomiting/diarrhea like B12) so I didn’t have to run and ask for every single thing. Honestly my techs still have to ask me regularly if I want a B12 injection for this diarrhea dog because I forget it exists all the time and the other 2 doctors I work with use it religiously.
No one expects you to remember everything and it is actually impossible to do so. You got this.

 

[pp9]

Hi all.

I just graduated this May and am about to start working. I took some time off to have a break and feel ready to start working. I recently started reviewing some things and am not remembering nearly as much as I thought I would. I am now feeling incredibly under prepared. I had gone through school with the plan of being mixed animal/mostly large animal but have had to pivot to only small animal for my first year(s). Thus I didn’t have as many small animal focused 4th year courses (dermatology, dentistry, IM). I feel like I am going to have to look everything up all of the time and not know the answer most of the time.

I am not feeling ready to be a doctor and am freaking out a bit.

Any advice or encouragement is welcomed.

I graduated in 2019 and I'm still not ready to be a doctor 😉

In all seriousness, what you are feeling is completely normal. It's normal to need to look stuff up, even years out. The first several months, maybe even 1-2 years, are completely terrifying.

I felt like I knew absolutely nothing coming out of school. You will learn so much in your first year out that schools just can't effectively teach or prepare you for. You will see cases/presentations that you never got to see in school. It gets easier, but feeling like you don't know what to do every so often is pretty normal, even years out. I've seen vets with decades of experience posting their confusing cases to the Facebook groups. I myself have called friends to pick their brains.

It gets better. One day you'll wake up and realize 5 years have gone by, and you're a fully functioning doctor. Then the cycle repeats, and you become the sounding board for a new grad.

 

[WhtsThFrequency]

I graduated 14 years ago (holy ****) and am a specialist and I still consult Dr. Google every day hahaha. I'm literally about to walk two slides down to the department office bank because I have no idea wtf it is and I'm hoping someone else does - that's what consults are for. Never worry about having to do that. It is far more important to know good sources to check when you have a question than to try to remember everything - because the latter is impossible.

Vet med is a lifelong learning process - you're not expected to know everything out of school, and you're still not expected to know everything 5, 10, 20 years out. In school, "not knowing" is treated differently because it's school - you're being tested and given numbers (ie a grade). In the real world, you have to say "I don't know" a lot - and that's okay. Know where to go find the answer.

 

[Drjc1977]

I graduated 14 years ago (holy ****) and am a specialist and I still consult Dr. Google every day hahaha. I'm literally about to walk two slides down to the department office bank because I have no idea wtf it is and I'm hoping someone else does - that's what consults are for. Never worry about having to do that. It is far more important to know good sources to check when you have a question than to try to remember everything - because the latter is impossible.

Vet med is a lifelong learning process - you're not expected to know everything out of school, and you're still not expected to know everything 5, 10, 20 years out. In school, "not knowing" is treated differently because it's school - you're being tested and given numbers (ie a grade). In the real world, you have to say "I don't know" a lot - and that's okay. Know where to go find the answer.

One of the best things I have learned as a practitioner was to admit to my self and then to the client was, "I do not know but I will find out." It was like a huge weight fell off my shoulders. I suppose there are those someplace or somewhere that feel they know it all. A few do, but most do not. Once you start practice and are no longer under pressure from the professors and residents who want you to know trivia such as the molecular weight of albumin, you will do fine.