Some background information: I have a huge passion for animals, and have lived with animals all of my life. I have volunteered at a shelter for a couple of months, and I have also taken quite a few agility/obedience classes with my dog, but unfortunately I have absolutely no experience in a veterinarian setting. I am a pre-vet full time student at a local community college. I fear my lack of experience won't land me any sort of job/volunteer experience. I have e-mailed multiple clinics asking to volunteer- and have only gotten one response stating I couldn't volunteer due to being a liability. I would really like to get my feet wet in the veterinary field in order to get experience hours required to apply to vet school, but also to enforce the fact that I do want to be a Veterinarian
Good to know! I shall try to apply to many places. As cowgirla mentioned earlier, is it recommended to go in person with a resume? I have also never had a job before, so I guess I have to brush up on my resume skills. I just fear being a pain. I don't want to walk in a crowded clinic asking for a job in place of a customer. There are a lot of forest preserves around here so you bring up a good point about working with wildlife. That sounds enjoyable if I can find someone who can take me!
You sound a lot like me! I started college with little experience (animal shelter and pets, mostly) but was in the pre vet track, surrounded by people who had so much more experience than me! It was a bit anxiety provoking, to say the least (actually, significantly so...) I also didn't have my first job until after my first year in college (what can I say? I was a very shy, socially anxious person back then!) I hate shadowing (always feel in the way...) and never had much luck finding clinics that were actually hiring for anything. I've gotten a lot of my experience through internships.
To answer your original question, if you have the money, I say do the class! I know I've done much better getting experience in more structured settings, as opposed to having to go out and cold call for jobs or what have you (which honestly might not be too successful for you without experience, but you never know! It's a lot of luck, to be honest). Although I have done that, I wasn't too successful. One job I interviewed for I didn't get the job because they had applicants with more experience (this was before I had the experience I have now), and the other they seem perturbed that I was planning on applying to vet school for the following year (which I didn't end up doing) and thus would only be around for a little over a year... which seems ridiculous to me, because being able to commit a whole year to an entry level job seems pretty good. But what can I say? I was living in a very classy small city full of rich people and granola eating hippie wannabes on a Canadian island where pedestrians actually truly do have the right of way and lots of other, crazy unusual things, so maybe there they're used to entry level employees actually sticking around awhile?
The keeper positions look fun but you bring up a good point. They offer a nutrition or endocrinology internships as well. Nutrition looks interesting! Endocrinology involves looking at fecal samples, so naturally I am not the most interested in that one! Thanks for the encouragement! I shall definitely apply!
First off, just as a caveat, in a nutrition internship you are likely going to be spending a lot time chopping fruit, sorting fish, prepping meat, weighing out grain, fulfilling departmental orders and probably (no--definitely...) doing dishes. You may get to learn a bit about diets in terms of knowing what's safe to feed an animal, etc., but you probably aren't going to get to learn a lot about the more scientific aspects of the animals' nutrition. You definitely won't get hands on work with animals and depending on how the zoo's set up, might not ever interact with very many people in the zoo. But I could be wrong. Not saying it's not a good experience, but just some things to keep in mind, especially for someone who wants to be a vet, as opposed to an animal care taker. Keeper internships can be great, though! I just finished an internship at the pittsburgh zoo and it was lots of fun! Although working with big cats is a dream of mine, I decided to do my internship in our children's zoo area instead as it was more hands on. I worked with a lot of so called "less dangerous" animals like native wildlife, farm animals, bats, sea lions, kangaroos, etc. and was able to touch most of them (and often do things like hand feeding, grooming, occasional skunk snuggling, etc.) So depending on the zoo, you can do very hands on keeper internships! Even if you're working with animals you don't get to directly touch it can be a very valuable learning experience. A lot (if not all) of keeper internships usually include programs in training/enrichment, which are valuable concepts to understand as a vet. Just being a part of a different aspect of the animal industry and experiencing the politics (of which there is a lot...) and sometimes rough coworker relationships (as a keeper once told me, most keepers decide they want to work with animals because they're not good with people) is valuable too.
Most zoos aren't big on letting people volunteer or shadow or do any sort of more casual commitment in their hospitals, and there aren't a lot of hospital internships open to prevet students--however there are some, if you look hard enough and are willing to go to a different city for the summer (I know this isn't always possible for everyone). The AZA website is a good place to look at internship listings.
http://www.aza.org/joblistings/ You can come intern with me at the national aviary hospital-it's lots of fun! (sorry for the ad... we've been short on interns for too long cause somebody forgot to post the ad last fall and I'm going a bit crazy having to do all the cleaning by myself...) I've had many, many amazing supposedly once in a lifetime experiences there--though I've been there for a whole year and most interns are only there for 3-4 months, so I've done a lot of stuff most people don't usually get to do... But a lot of it is luck--we had a crazy busy/intense spring and summer last year, but an extremely slow fall (much to the complaint of the fall interns...)
A realize this was a very long reply (I'm a notorious rambler...), but hopefully some info was helpful!
