I am a recent vet school grad entering a PhD program this fall. Does anyone have experience working part-time as a vet during their PhD years? I have already accepted a job working about 6 days a month, weekends only, as an associate vet. I approached my PhD adviser before I accepted the job and his response was, "If you do work, I don't want to know about it." I checked with my program and it does not have any restrictions on part-time work. My PhD is about 95% lab bench work in nature and I still want to develop myself as a clinician. I'm looking for advice on if this is feasible. Any insight from other DVM/PhDs would be much appreciated.
Working as a part-time veterinarian during PhD studies
- Thread starter Zilla72
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Don't. Your mental health and research will suffer for it. It's not really practical - you're going to have experiments that run into and through weekends all the time. Let alone needing time to read and stay current with literature, time to write papers, and hell - time to relax.
Six days a month is not enough to truly develop you as a clinician anyways. It would keep you at baseline at best.
I do approx one weekend a month on call for the hospital and I don't think I could handle much more than that given my program and the intensity of my projects. Yeah, it sucks having to put your vet stuff "on hold" but that's what a PhD requires. Keep up with the literature, attend CE, maybe occasionally help out with spay/neuter clinics every now and then....much more feasible.
Six days a month is not enough to truly develop you as a clinician anyways. It would keep you at baseline at best.
I do approx one weekend a month on call for the hospital and I don't think I could handle much more than that given my program and the intensity of my projects. Yeah, it sucks having to put your vet stuff "on hold" but that's what a PhD requires. Keep up with the literature, attend CE, maybe occasionally help out with spay/neuter clinics every now and then....much more feasible.
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Thanks for your insight. The things you mentioned are what worried me the most. Most of my first year will be mostly class work so I may give part time work a try for at least this year. If it begins to be too time consuming I can always quit or cut back. I can see part-time work being most problematic my third year post prelims, when I'll be diving into my thesis work. Thanks again.
