You spend your entire academic career breezing through classes, hardly studying, making straight A's. Then you get to vet school, and suddenly, you're not the smart kid anymore. There are times you struggle just to pass (even when you study your butt off). You will genuinely celebrate C's (C's=DVM's after all). And making A's and B's? Better not spread that around because your classmates are going to want to kill you (except for those disgusting creatures with photographic memory that are still breezing through school... they just pity you). And don't be fooled when everyone assures you that you are eased into things your first year. First semester=weed out semester, and don't forget it.
2. Your pets become your specimens. And you'll never see them the same way.
During anatomy, you are encouraged to palpate structures in your pets. They hate you for it. All the poking and prodding and flexing and extending. Poor things. And really, after you've seen what they look like on the inside and have learned every single bone, muscle, artery, vein, nerve, etc., they aren't just your beloved pets anymore. They are these highly complex organisms with all these intricate systems with so many functions that can go wrong in so many ways. Your dog gets short of breath after running? Oh my god, what if he has congestive heart failure?! Your cat starts peeing more than normal? Must be diabetes..
3. You will be treated like a vet.
You'll be flattered, of course, but when someone finds out you're a vet student and starts asking you all kinds of questions about their pet's health, all you can do is shrug and feel like a worthless idiot. Yeah, you probably have more knowledge about animals than most people, but you don't know nearly as much as you want to know. Not yet, anyway. And you definitely can't make diagnoses or recommend treatment plans. So you say, "It sounds like things aren't normal; you should really take your pet to a vet," and then you get these weird looks of disappointment. Sorry, guys; I'm not a vet yet.
4. You will never fully trust a human doctor again.
I'm not saying human doctors aren't well-trained or don't know what they're doing... I'm just saying we might be a little more well-trained. First, it's harder to get into vet school than med school (near perfect GPA, thousands, yes, THOUSANDS of hours of volunteering/job shadowing/previous experience, high test scores.. it's not easy). And then you get in and realize that med school really would have been the easier choice. Here's a table to compare:
Med School
|
Vet School
|
|
Instructional Periods
|
8 weeks
|
8 weeks
|
Testing
|
Only during finals week
|
Throughout all 8 weeks along
with finals (and did I mention that we still have to attend our normal
classes during finals week? Even though we are being destroyed by monstrous
exams..)
|
Breaks
|
One week off after every
finals week
|
Ha.
|
Grades
|
Pass or fail (with the opportunity to make up failed classes)
|
A-F, so there is still plenty
of annoying competition and feeling stupid (and one F= kicked out)
|
Schedule
|
From what I’ve heard, they’re
usually out by 3. At the latest.
|
Some days, we don’t get out
until 7 pm (that’s 11-12 hours of being in classes/labs)
|
Material covered
|
One species
|
At least 10 species that we
actively compare (and have to learn as in depth as the one species med
students have to learn.. and in the same amount of time, I might add)
|
5. School isn't the only thing you'll have to worry about.
You're going to have all of these added responsibilities that you never thought might interfere with your studies. Like club obligations. Which doesn't seem so bad because clubs can be really fun, but then you are practically forced to join certain ones, and not only do you have to give them all your monies, but you also have to do all of this ridiculous volunteering for them (that is, mandatory volunteering). Then you have to help with school/class fundraisers and events and cleaning. And you thought you were done with those things when you finished undergrad. Silly you.
6. You will smell like death. Every single day for an entire year.
You are going to be spending a minimum of 9 hours a week in the anatomy lab (most of the time, it's more like 12-15). And you're going to get disgusting. Maybe cat dissections were nice, neat, and easy to clean up, but dogs that are almost as big as you are? And don't even get me started on the horses and cows. You are going to be wrestling with, rolling in, and diving into these smelly (sometimes moldy) embalmed animal carcasses. And let me tell you, the smell of formalin lingers. Especially in your hair. And did I mention that formalin (aka watered down formaldehyde) is a carcinogen? Yep, you're probably going to get cancer from this.
And you're going to get disgusting in ways you never expected. For example, when trying to put our freshly skinned, fat covered dog up after lab one day, my hand slipped as I was pulling the bag, and I punched my lab partner in the face with my slimy, fat/chemical covered hand (I was wearing gloves, but her face was not). And my hand was so slippery that after I punched her, all that goo slid right across her lips. Pretty sure she still hasn't forgiven me for that one...
7. Vet school consumes your brain.
Your life will = vet school. You don't realize how true that is until you're actually living it, I guess. But you will be eating, sleeping, dreaming, pooping, peeing, breathing, thinking vet school. It never stops. You will no longer function as a real human being. Everything in your life becomes referenced to vet school. Your urine is concentrated? Oh, anti-diuretic hormone.. look at you doing your job! You have to poop after eating a meal? That gastrocolic reflex is kicking in! You start seeing things that aren't really there... a picture of rainbow and a tornado looks like a uterus, a statue looks like an erythrocyte with prominent central pallor (must be from a dog). You forget normal, every day things. I forgot what a table was one day. I could tell you every single muscle in the pelvic limb, its origins, insertions, and innervations, but that thing over there... that you put things on... and it has legs... no idea. Your friends outside of vet school will be embarrassed to be seen in public with you because you won't be able to refrain from talking about parasites or necrosis or genitalia at the dinner table. You will literally become crazy.
8. You only get to play with dead animals.
For the first two years, you'll barely even see living animals apart from your own pets. Just dead things that you dissect and study. It's so sad, but you even start getting attached to your dead animals. We named our dissection dog Leroy. The cat was Ms. Kitty. Our horse is Richard. Our cow is Bessie. You even start giving them personalities ("Leroy is such a good boy! Look how well he's holding his leg up for us! While we cut into his muscles..."). If you didn't have a morbid sense of humor before getting into vet school, you'll develop one. You have to to keep from completely losing your mind in anatomy (well, that's arguable..). And let me tell you, things start getting weird in anatomy lab really quick. I caught one of my lab partners scratching his face with our dog's paw one day. And sometimes we make giant fat balls to play catch with. And there are so many penis jokes (when talking about which half of the animal each group got, an instructor came up to my lab partner that had the penis half our our horse and said, "Oh, you got the good side!" to which she replied, "Yeah, and they got the shaft, but they didn't get.... the shaft.").
9. It's terrifying.
Obviously you'll have this constant fear of failing (because one screwed up test could do it), but you also start getting a taste for how hard it is to be a vet financially, mentally, physically, and emotionally. People come in to talk to you about how broke you're going to be when you get out (as if you didn't already know), how hard it might be for you to find a job, and how little money you're going to make. And you just sit there thinking, "Why am I doing this again?" And then the reality of all the animals that have to die just so you can learn hits you (I'm not going to dwell on this one). And then another speaker comes in and tells you how she's been married 4 times because she works so much that she has trouble making family come first. It's an absolutely draining career choice. Yet we continue on... we must be crazy (I mean, the suicide rate for vets is pretty high...).
10. No one is going to get it.
You are going to have to sacrifice so much while you're in vet school. Family time, friend time, relationship time, you time, even animal time. All the things that were most important to you in life are going to have to take a (hopefully) temporary backseat while you're in vet school because that's what you'll have to focus on. It's heartbreaking how many of my classmates have already had loved ones pass away during our first year of vet school, and yeah, they got to leave for the funerals (and in doing so, put themselves at a huge academic disadvantage), but they never got to say goodbye. They didn't get the chance to spend time with them before they left their lives forever. And you can complain to your family and friends about how hard it is, but they won't understand. Not truly. The only ones that get it are your classmates. They become your temporary family and support system, and thank god for them because you probably wouldn't survive without them.
All these things being said; do I regret choosing this career path? Not for a minute. What can I say... I'm just completely insane.
