Questions about specializing later in career (specifically E/CC)

[ShaWalla]

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Hi all! First 4 weeks of vet school done. Holy cow, it's a lot, but I am loving it so far.

Obviously I still have a ton to learn, and I'm not certain about wanting to specialize, but I am very interested in small animal emergency medicine.

I wanted to know if it would be unusual or very difficult to get a residency in emergency and critical care after being a general ER doctor for a few years? For reasons I won't share right now, I would probably wouldn't be able to do a residency right out of school, but I do plan on doing a rotating internship. If I did a rotating internship, then worked as an ER doc for a few years, would it be very hard to get a residency in E/CC?

 

[JaynaAli]

I don’t have enough experience in the ECC field to say how applying a few years after graduation might affect your chances, but I think that one of the biggest difficulties/adjustments in going back to training later is partly the mental shift back into a student/learning mindset but a big challenge is the financial changes. A resident is going to be making a fraction of the salary you will have become used to as a practicing ER veterinarian, and taking a sudden 75% salary cut back to resident wages (example percentage, ymmv) after your lifestyle has crept up over the past few years can be tough. It’s a bit easier to just do them sequentially and “live like a student” longer before your lifestyle creeps up and expenses rise.