VMCAS questions

[WIvet]

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Hi everyone,
I am a first time applicant this year and I have a few questions that I was hoping others who have applied before could answer.

For the veterinary experience part do you make a new entry for every experience or just cram all your experiences from one vet into one entry? I have been mainly shadowing 2 vets and am not quite sure how to word all of experiences I have had with them in 480 words...any help is greatly appreciated!!

Also for the honors and awards section is it appropriate to list awards from high school?? OR should I just stick to college awards??

Thanks!! 😀

 

[BlacKAT33]

Include all experiences/honors/awards from HS/undergrad/grad (if applicable)

Cram all experiences from one vet into the entry. You're right, they don't give you much space. Honestly, i can't remember if they list vet experiences by the person's name or by the place, but either way, for each place/vet you have to cram everything in that section, you cant talk about multiple experiences in separate sections if it was with that same vet/place. Does that make sense? i think i'm confusing myself lol You'll need to write in short sentences, bullets, commas, however you want to fit it all in there.

If you really have A LOT missing that you need to fit in, you could separate some things and create an animal experience. I think they also say you can write in the explanation statement anything you are missing. But honestly, I hear more people use that for explaining grades/illnesses/death...etc (and even this is a whole new topic on its own! search explanation statement and you can read more threads on the forum)

 

[WIvet]

Thanks!! That helps a lot 🙂

 

[breenie]

Ooooh, a fellow Wisconsin person!

 

[moosenanny]

You're right - 480 characters is certainly not a lot of space to work with. So, you want to make your descriptions as dense and compact as possible. Cram in as much info while still making it intelligible. I'd suggest that if you have repeated experiences (i.e., you drew blood at multiple animal hospital jobs), you should put that down once, and then write about additional/new skills in later positions.

While people devote a whole lot of attention to their personal statement, I think these short job descriptions get overlooked. I spent a few months editing and reworking my descriptions to get the most out of the fewest words. I had friends and family members edit those in addition to my personal statement so that I could get help cutting out unnecessary characters and making sure I wasn't selling myself and my experiences short.

 

[nyanko]

I used hella sentence fragments in that section, and I know others who bullet pointed. There was waaaaaaaaay too much to make it all into something that flowed well and was coherent. For me, I'd rather make sure everything's in there at the expense of how well it reads.

 

[BlacKAT33]

While people devote a whole lot of attention to their personal statement, I think these short job descriptions get overlooked. I spent a few months editing and reworking my descriptions to get the most out of the fewest words. I had friends and family members edit those in addition to my personal statement so that I could get help cutting out unnecessary characters and making sure I wasn't selling myself and my experiences short.

this is a good point. no one talks about these small paragraphs much but i also spent a lot of time editing them. i probably had about 10 versions of these lil paragraphs before i sent it in lol Also, if you start working on the app early you will def be adding last minute things that you have done before you submit your app, so you'll be cramming even more in!

 

[milkmaid]

Not to get off topic - but - do y'all think that "etc" is an appropriate thing to put in the job descriptions? I've put it in several descriptions when I was listing things I'd done or observed at a particular clinic/job and ran out of room but not out of things I'd done, but I'm still debating whether it's okay to put in the description. I tried to list the major things and hoped "etc" was sufficient to cover the minor things. What do you folks think?

 

[that redhead]

Not to get off topic - but - do y'all think that "etc" is an appropriate thing to put in the job descriptions? I've put it in several descriptions when I was listing things I'd done or observed at a particular clinic/job and ran out of room but not out of things I'd done, but I'm still debating whether it's okay to put in the description. I tried to list the major things and hoped "etc" was sufficient to cover the minor things. What do you folks think?

I personally have tried to stay away from "etc" and do what is mentioned above (re-wording to get the most in). The way I looked at it was: what did "etc" entail? I wouldn't put something significant under "etc", and I listed minor things like drawing up vaccines or doing health checks because I had the room. "Etc" to me is stuff like sweeping, folding towels, re-stocking rooms and cabinets. I put these under categories like "cleaning" or something.

 

[nyanko]

I don't know about "etc" (I think I used it to be honest...), but I'd make sure if you're writing things that you observed that it's clear you only observed them. My first (unsuccessful) interview, one of my interviewers picked out a really random thing from my list of duties at a clinic and asked me detailed questions about it (it was compounding meds - we used the FLAVORx system) like what the process was and what was in the solution we used and how often did we do it and for what kind of meds and such. I also got asked about cat vaccines, which ones did we use and why, but that part was easier because I had to explain it to clients so often, rather than just having done it a bunch of times and not explained it previously.

 

[rhinocerotidae]

I've never applied yet, so I'm a little unfamiliar with how the VMCAS is set up. When you list veterinary experiences is the 480 word limit for EACH veterinary experience separately (ie: 480 words per experience) OR let's say you have many different veterinary experiences do you have to explain all of them within 480 words.

I'm assuming that this would also apply to animal experience as well.

 

[purplesaurus]

I've never applied yet, so I'm a little unfamiliar with how the VMCAS is set up. When you list veterinary experiences is the 480 word limit for EACH veterinary experience separately (ie: 480 words per experience) OR let's say you have many different veterinary experiences do you have to explain all of them within 480 words.

I'm assuming that this would also apply to animal experience as well.

The 480-character limit applies to each entry you create under the experiences section.

 

[rhinocerotidae]

The 480-character limit applies to each entry you create under the experiences section.

eek! Only 480 characters... that's not very much (but at least it's for each entry). Thanks for the reply!