Thoughts/Recommendations between Purdue/UDel/UMass Amherst for aspiring future vet?

DadTwoGirls
Sun, 20 Feb 2022 16:53:42 +0000

gcmom1:

We don’t live in an area with easy access to large animal vets, so she would like to get this experience at school if possible.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I think that large animal experience was probably one thing that helped my daughter get accepted to several DVM programs. At one point I mentioned that I was impressed that she had reached inside a cow three different ways. She gave me a very puzzled look, and asked “which way don’t you know about?”.

It did occur to me after I made my last post that some universities might have a pre-vet concentration within their animal science major, while some other universities might have pre-vet as a separate major. It appears that my daughter did the first of these. Thus while her official major was “animal science” her transcript is probably really “(animal science) with a pre-vet orientation”. I am pretty sure that she did have a good pre-vet advisor. We also live in an area where there are some large animals around, so she was able to get some large animal experience in high school. I think that it helped her quite a bit that she went to a university that had large animals relatively close to campus and that has a program where pre-vet students could do things like draw blood from cows and administer medications (some of which need to be placed inside the cows one way or another). She also as an undergraduate student got to pull baby cows out of their mothers to help with the birthing process. She was a bit disappointed that the first calf that she pulled out happened to be a male – male calves have short lives. Of course the same program, as well as a separate job that she had near campus while an undergraduate student, included quite a bit of cleaning up after large animals. She also had a lot of horse experience in addition to a lot of cow experience. She might have had a little bit of sheep, goat, and llama experience but this was far more limited. Certainly some very good universities do not have these large animals even remotely close to campus.

I have also heard of veterinary technicians applying to DVM programs several times and having trouble not getting accepted anywhere in spite of their significant animal experience. I have wondered how much of this comes down to the confidence that the veterinarian has in their vet tech, which vet tech the veterinarian chooses to help them on surgeries, and what gets written in the letters of reference. My daughter and I have both speculated that her acceptances were probably more due to her experience and her references rather than her grades, but it is hard to know and her grades were at least marginally (very marginally) better than average for all students accepted to DVM programs nationwide.