Solutions for Pet Healthcare
A local practice

Try anything

If you've always wanted to become a vet and you're wondering where to start, the answer is anywhere ie. put pen to paper or pick up the phone, and contact a local practice for work experience. It's what you'll need to see, to understand if a vet's job is anything like you thought it would be. Most practices will be happy to see you, since it's an extra pair of helping hands. There'll be restrictions on where you can go and what you can do, but there's no substitute for experience. It's best to find out first hand if vetting is what you really want to do.



Simply fix it


If you've left things late and not spend a lot of time around vets or vet practices, simply set things right and get as much experience as you can. Perhaps the most interesting and appealing characteristic of anyone wishing to become a vet is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is about doing everything and anything ie. willingly accepting the unpleasant jobs as well as the enjoyable ones. If there's a group of students who all want to become vets, and they're all academically good, the ones that will stand out will be the enthusastic ones. EpiVet has seen a number of work experience students over the years, and the ones that were always welcomed back were the enthusiastic ones.


First chance, the best chance

Your first chance to get into vet school is the best chance. If you fail to gain excellent A level results and end up taking Animal Science instead, you'll have to obtain your first degree (a non-veterinary one), and then fund vet training afterwards. There's always the opportunity to go abroad [please see the 'Student's Page above], but it involves travelling through Europe, and that may or may not appeal to you. Whatever you choose to do, the bottom line is that financially and mentally, it's far less stressful if you get good A level results.


What's it like at vet school?

Vet school is probably one of the most fascinating times of your educational life (when you're first starting to interact with animals on a clinical basis), and you'll have little to zero responsibility for the outcome of your treatments. It's like driving a Ferrari as fast as you can, but you never crash. It's not a bad way to spend four or five years. The course structure is practically based (unless you train in Spain) and you'll receive an interesting mix of theory, plus an immediate application of all that theory to real life situations. It's jolly good fun and training as a vet has got to be one of the most pleasurable pieces of full-time learning you could ever undertake.


What's it like, being a vet?

The moment you come out of vet school the training wheels are off. Every clinical decision you make you jolly well inherit, and you live or die by them, but that's not the hard part. Neither is the fact that the animals you treat aren't always feeling too good, and will usually want to bite, kick or stamp on the vet. The hardest part is remembering that the customers are human too. They're generally under stress and looking for a cure at the end of the treatment, because after all, this is the 21st century. When the treatment ends in success you're the best vet in the world and there's just no way anyone could be better than you, because clearly, all you've done is a total miracle. Occasionally though the treatment ends in death or failure, and on these occasions you can suddenly become the world's worst medic who hasn't got much of a clue, and in fact, you never should've got a vet licence in the first place! Surely there's something in between these two extremes though, isn't there? Absolutely... they're called vet nurses.

And then there's out-of-hours. Human medicine has dispensed with it, but the old boys at the RCVS (who decide the rules) have had to put up with out-of-hours during their careers, so everyone else has to as well. [Incidentally, in the last two years the RCVS struck a vet off because he didn't make a home visit out-of-hours.]

Then there's invoicing. The poor clients are already shell-shocked by the fact that their pets are poorly, but at the end of it all, some clients can feel that their vets are taking quite a lot of money from them. Vet employees usually just down-size many of the invoices, and that seems to work for them. However, their vet employers usually want to dock the employees' wages by the same lost amounts, because yet again, another £1000 invoice has arrived and it's from from the Health and Safety officer this time. He's looked at the x-ray machine this year, and he's confirmed that yes, it's exactly the same as it was last year, and the x-ray machine does in fact work. Of course, no one actually knew that, because everyone's only been using it for the past 12 months... regularly! Somehow though (and amongst all these distractions) you might actually get some time to treat some of the sick animals.

Get out quick

If you do find that you've made a big mistake, and for some reason or another you'd rather be doing something else [yet ironically you can't find that out until you've made the mistake] ... then get out quickly. If you make a change early on in your working life, it's not such an enormous problem. Moreover, even when changing career direction in later life isn't that easy, there are some interesting areas within the veterinary industry that might still play to your strengths. Research for example, is a thoroughly interesting and rewarding career direction to investigate, and it has little to do with test tubes or Bunsen burners. Research is more to do with finding good, solid solutions for practical problems or other fascinating issues that arise ie. perhaps in combating the spread of animal diseases, or possibly improving the efficiency of vaccines, etc. The solutions you find are closely linked to an immense satisfaction when you stumble upon a eureka moment, or find an unexpected answer to an ongoing enigma. It's very rewarding.



The RCVS don't make your tea!

When you first hear of the RCVS you think that they're the best organisation you could ever possibly become a member of, and you're proud of the MRCVS letters that you've worked hard to achieve. However, only 18 per cent of vets will vote in the RCVS elections each year, and most of those are somehow involved with the elections. Can you think of any other election where 82 per cent of the electorate never bother to turn out? Yet whatever anyone tells you, you've got to judge for yourself what the RCVS are like.