Veterinary Experience Question

[SaintSamson]

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Hey,

I don't know if this has been brought up before, so I apologize if it has!

At the moment, I work at a SA hospital part time. It's good, my first job was as kennel help and now I've completed my training and will be doing one shift a week as a doctor assistant in addition to my regular kennel help job.

Long story short: I left my last college in 2005 and have been attending a local University part time. I applied for full time admission to another local University that I think will be a fabulous fit and benefit me towards applying to vet school, and I'm waiting to hear back about my application for spring semester (the admission counselor was very encouraging about my acceptance and gave me a plan B just in case so ensure I get in). I found a loop hole in the state University that allows me to take 14 credits (4 classes) online, so I'm going to do those this term.

My mom is very supportive but as my class load increases, she wants me to cut back on my hours at the vet hospital (I've been working 26 hours a week, starting this week, I drop down to about 22). By December I will have 1200+ hours of SA vet experience. If I get into the university, my class load will increase even more, and my mom will want me to cut back on work almost all the way (prob to about 10 hours a week).

I'm wondering if I should continue with the vet hospital and gain more hours after December and try and convince my mom to allow me to work a little bit more so I'm actually an asset as an employee, or if I should leave and find shadowing opportunities or a very part time job with another type of veterinary experience. The SA vet experience is the only vet experience I have aside from 8 hours shadowing an equine vet, and I plan to get more shadowing experience with some specialists, equine vets, and a wildlife research vet (hopefully) during the summer. I do have a large amount of varied animal experience, so I'm not concerned about that.

Also, the vet hospital I'm at is a 10 vet practice. While I take a hold of all opportunities to watch procedures and learn, none of the vets go out of their way to show me things or teach things, despite the fact that they know I plan to apply to vet school in about 2 years. Is there anything I can do to encourage them to clue me in on stuff without pestering them?

(Sorry, that was a bit long!!)

 

[ckd816]

Hi!

I was in a situation very similar to yours about a year ago. I personally chose to take some time away from work to focus on grades. However, this was mainly due to the fact that I didn't really feel like the clinic I was working in was a good fit for me once I started shadowing vets and such since it was such a large practice (I think 14 vets). I just felt like I never really had a connection with any vet since a different one was there every time I came so no real relationships formed (read no LOR as well). I had started in the kennels too so with all of those hours (about 1000), I had already realized I don't really want to go into SA anyway and it would be wiser to get other experiences.

So, I guess it just would depend on how you're feeling with your connections with the vets on the job as well as your ultimate career interests. And of course how things are balancing out with school! 😉

 

[twelvetigers]

Make sure you do seek a variety of experiences... if you need to cut back at the SA clinic, you can perhaps use any extra time to shadow LA, wildlife/exotic, or maybe get involved in a research project? Be careful with those, though - they can be more time consuming than 26 hours a week at a job.

 

[Angelo84]

If you enjoy the job I would try to keep it at least at a part time level. That said if your only experience is in small animal I would highly recommend branching out into large animal, exotics, research, or zoo jusst to diversify your experiences a bit. Who knows you might really like cows! Maybe use winter break (if its a solid month or so and you go somewhere for a full day three days a week it builds up well.). For my investigating into other fields I found 100-200 hours were sufficient to get a good feel for what goes on.