Becoming a Veterinarian

Boris Kachka

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501159480
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Choosing what to do with your life begins with imagining yourself in a career. Using stories of real practitioners in the field, the Masters at Work series offers the opportunity to see through the eyes of someone who has mastered a profession and learn what the risks and rewards of a job really are. According to a LinkedIn survey that polled 8, 000 professionals, the second most popular childhood dream job for respondents was a veterinarian. It's a career that appeals to many, due to its involvement with animals and association with helping and doing good. Still, much of the day-to-day elements of the job are not known by the wider public. This series, and individual guide, provides valuable and relevant information about what daily life for a professional veterinarian is like, and will be a vital resource for anyone interested in pursuing the path. Is there such a thing as a typical veterinarian? Journalist and author Boris Kachka sets out on a journey, determined to discover how to turn a childhood dream into a real career. Becoming a Veterinarian is a behind-the-scenes, honest, and inspiring look at the day-to-day life of a veterinarian through the eyes of four people who have made this career their life's work. There's Michael, who thought he would be an architect, but instead works with urban pets at the ASPCA in New York; Elisha, who studied dance before she began treating cows, cats, and horses; Idina, who was injured in a car accident and was forced to find a second career; and Chick, who was earning a Masters in economics but turned to veterinarian science after he began working nights at an animal hospital. With each, Kachka dives into every element of the job: science, surgery, financials, finding a program, and everything in between.

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MONEY ISN’T IT: STARTING OUT

Michael Lund was raised in North Dakota, and though he moved to Brooklyn years ago, he has not shed the Lutheran sincerity of the Great Plains. A soulful do-gooder, he talks easily to strangers—he knew every single classmate in vet school—but he doesn’t go in for the small talk of the typical extrovert. He makes intense, empathetic eye contact and shares oddly formal introspections (“It was pretty evident that it was not my dream anymore”) with a downcast glare that almost makes you tear up. His blond hair flips down in a vaguely emo style, and his slight frame makes it easy to forget that he’s six feet four inches tall.

Lund grew up in Crosby, North Dakota, ten miles from the Canadian border. He comes from an extended family of farmers and ranchers, and spent much of his youth among them. An hour’s drive from the nearest veterinarian, Lund was the neighborhood’s designated dog and cat sitter. “If someone was going out of town: ‘Oh, call the Lund kid. He’ll come by and take care of it.’ ” He arrived at Montana State University without a specific major, favoring English and architecture but taking plenty of science courses, too. Halfway through school he met a vet one town over in Belgrade, Montana, who’d been practicing for years as an itinerant ranch veterinarian but had recently expanded from his garage to a mixed-animal practice. Lund wound up pulling shifts there.

For would-be vets like the young Lund, working as a vet assistant or tech is both a prerequisite and a gateway drug. The job can be a career of its own, akin to nursing, but for teenagers or college students interested in a veterinary career it’s an essential stepping stone. In contrast to human medicine, vets techs and assistants don’t have to be licensed, and for the medically curious, it’s much easier to get your hands dirty at a vet clinic than a human practice. At least a little bit of such prior experience is virtually required for admission to vet school.

“With human medicine, you can’t touch the people,” says Olivia Love, a recent graduate of Colorado State’s DVM program. Growing up in New Mexico, she would ride out on farm calls with animal doctors, and during college she spent summer breaks helping out. She was torn between human and animal medicine in college, but veterinary care gave her the opportunity to work hands-on before submitting a single application. Soon she was hooked.

For those who grew up maybe a little too attached to pets, early tech jobs offer a chance to develop a professional distance from their emotions. Johanna Ecke, an associate in a New Orleans clinic, was a sensitive child; Bambi left her sobbing. While she took a pre-vet track at Tulane, “I wasn’t certain I could handle the emotional aspect,” she says. Even her parents wondered if she was up for it. But after Hurricane Katrina, she became an assistant at the Magazine Street Animal Clinic. “I got a lot of exposure to the realistic side”—and the confidence it took to apply to vet school. After graduating, she came back to Magazine Street. In a competitive field, many vets return to the practices where they had their first jobs and their earliest mentors.

The flip side of all that opportunity is the uncomfortable fact that vet technicians make a median of $32,000 a year. The class gap between career techs and veterinarians is wide and growing; in areas with high numbers of skilled immigrants, tech positions are filled with recent arrivals who were vets in their home countries, getting by on tech salaries while saving up for expensive vet licensing exams.

But getting into vet school takes more than experience; it takes an early awareness of the prerequisites you need (usually a premed track plus a few ecology or animal science courses). Premed students get plenty of advice, but would-be vets often have to look a little harder to find mentors. For Michael Lund at Montana State, it took persistence. “I kept trying to get a real conversation with my pre-vet advisor,” he says, “but she was busy; she worked part-time. At some point, my mom marched in there and found this lady and reminded her that I should be given a chance.”

Inbal Lavotshkin, now the medical director of VERE South, a Brooklyn emergency animal hospital, didn’t get the advice she was looking for, so she looked elsewhere. At Rutgers University, she was a middling student well into her junior year, and doesn’t necessarily regret it. “I think I grew as a person by not being completely straight-edge,” she says. An ecology major, she visited Australia on a volunteer conservation trip and learned a lot about the biology of the animals. “I realized that my passion was in medicine,” and that practicing it might be the way to “give back” to the planet.

Just before the start of her senior year, Lavotshkin walked into the office of Rutgers’s vet-school advisor, who told her that it was too late to get all her prerequisites. She sought a second opinion from her ecology professor. On his advice, she wrote an essay explaining her transition and made a private commitment to get straight A’s, which she did. She had to spend a summer catching up on chemistry and calculus. It wasn’t that hard; it just took confidence and focus.

“I was a few steps behind,” says Lavotshkin. “But we all end up in the same place. I would never tell someone in college that it’s too late.” For every vet who sailed straight through into vet school, there’s one who spent one or two or four years after college in post-baccalaureate classes fulfilling her requirements, or in clinics doing the grunt work.

Few vets exemplify the never-too-lateness of the DVM track better than M. Idina O’Brien, an ER surgeon in suburban Virginia. Her childhood dream had nothing to do with animals. “My mom took me to see The Nutcracker when I was four years old,” she says. “Every little girl was looking at the ballerinas, but I was fascinated by the women in the orchestra pit.” So she requested a clarinet. O’Brien graduated from Juilliard and spent a decade performing with ensembles around the world. Then, in her early thirties, she was in a devastating car accident, which put her in the hospital for months. O’Brien had a life-threatening head injury and a severed nerve in her hand. “So that was the end of that career,” she says, with the casual air of someone who thinks little of minor obstacles like a life-altering hospitalization. “I’d never imagined doing anything other than being a musician.”

O’Brien’s mother gave her six months to figure out a new career. One evening, over dinner, “I said, ‘I want to apply to vet school.’ No one said anything for a couple minutes, and I was like, ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ Finally my mother said, ‘You don’t even have a high school education.’ Well, you never tell me I can’t do anything.” To anyone aspiring to be a vet, she offers two hard-learned lessons: First, “There has to be something in your personality that gets to your goal no matter what.” And second, “Find yourself a mentor.”

O’Brien found hers while still recovering from her accident, thanks in part to her beloved dog. One day she summoned up the courage to tell her animal’s vet, Dr. Louis Malacrida, about her plans. “He was probably a little skeptical himself,” O’Brien says, but he invited her to work for him. The first day she showed up in a silk dress and was sent home to change. She volunteered until Dr. Malacrida insisted on paying her, and soon he let her see clients on her own. In her vet-school yearbook she’d write: “Dr. Malacrida, I have you to blame for this, and I can’t thank you enough.”

Juilliard had a post-baccalaureate program through Columbia University, which she completed in three semesters. “It was a little challenging,” says O’Brien, with her knack for understatement. Her first application to vet school was submitted on a Friday; a letter of rejection followed on Monday, leading her to wonder if they looked past the first page. But her post-bac advisor advocated for her. She persuaded O’Brien to move to Philadelphia and apply to the University of Pennsylvania, where she was eventually accepted as an in-state student.

Her mother remained protective and skeptical. “You’re in a different world now,” she told her daughter. “You’re not twenty-five. What you did before is going to be held against you.” She may have been wrong about her daughter’s prospects, but she was right about this. Vet school began with a stint in the college hospital’s emergency room. “The first thing I did was introduce myself, and a head nurse said to me, ‘You’re not a musician, are you?’ Well I wasn’t anymore, so I said no. She said, ‘Oh good, because I heard we’re spoon-feeding some Juilliard reject through vet school.’ ”

Years later, one teacher confessed that much of the faculty had opposed her acceptance. O’Brien now conducts about a dozen prospective-student interviews a year for Penn, and she tries to stand up for students with artistic backgrounds. “I think they’re realizing the value of someone having a different lens. When something doesn’t work out”—say, on an operating table—“you have to rely on your creativity.” She believes her experience playing music in front of huge audiences gave her the confidence to perform in the emergency room. “In music if you make a mistake, you have to go forward.” The same ethic applies in the ER.

O’Brien’s concerns are echoed by the Association of American Veterinary Colleges (AAVMC), whose decade-long diversity drive is bearing fruit not just in racial and economic terms but also in the kinds of people admitted. “Many of our schools have adopted a more holistic admissions process that allows for criteria other than test scores,” says AAVMC CEO Andrew Maccabe.

Today’s programs admit not just former dance majors but also lawyers, farmers, and even a few disenchanted doctors. The crucible of vet school tends to burn away the differences in experience—eventually. Students from all kinds of backgrounds have to adjust their expectations. Harvard honors graduates suddenly find themselves in the middle of the pack, competing with kids who were raised stitching up cows. Those with years of vet-tech training bump up against straight-A overachievers. Frye, who majored in dance and biology at Marymount Manhattan College, says she “was not prepared for the level of intensity” at Cornell. “I failed the midterm and thought I was gonna flunk out. But then I was a C student, and then a B student.”

And now, she’s a vet: mission accomplished. Older students tend to enter vet school a little more focused on goals than grades. Early on at Penn, Dr. O’Brien published papers on immuno-parasitology. She expected to go into research before falling in love with patient care in her third year—and even then, she held herself to her own standards. “If there were sixty questions on a test and twenty were sheep questions, I’m not going to spend that much time learning about sheep,” she says. “Because the chances of me touching them are zero. So even if I got an eighty on that test, I still got one-hundred percent.”

Ken Osborn was a dairy farmer before going to vet school at the age of thirty-nine. He was bemused by all the young strivers around him at Cornell—in particular a twenty-one-year-old student named Becky. “Whiz kid, graduated early, sailed through college,” says Osborn. She was in his study group for one class, which culminated in one all-important final exam. Their results were placed in their mailboxes. “I got my grade and I’m walking down the hall, so happy. And I run into Becky, and she looks like she’s ready to cry. And I say ‘What’s wrong?’ ” It turned out they both got a B-plus. The difference was that Becky might never have earned less than an A before.

It’s in the fourth year of school, when students get to work hands-on with sick animals, that skill levels begin to equalize. By then, in most schools, they have begun to track into broad categories—large-animal, wildlife, and especially small-animal. More than two-thirds of the members of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) report working exclusively with companion animals.

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MICHAEL LUND HAD NO choice but to apply to a vet school out of state. North Dakota is one of twenty-one states with no vet schools. Lund still managed to pay in-state tuition at Colorado State University, thanks to one of many exchange programs whereby non-vet states compensate vet states, sometimes in return for a student’s commitment to work in his home state for a while. But students in some of the most populous states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, can’t apply as residents. The difference in tuition can add up to more than $100,000. For example, Colorado State charges $30,000 per year for in-state residents and $56,000 for out-of-state, meaning that Lund, who paid the lower fee, is only $60,000 in debt seven years later. Lavotshkin, who grew up in New Jersey, owes $330,000. Asked how she deals with it, she replies, “Denial.”

The debt-to-income ratio is the single greatest challenge in veterinary practice today. Not long before the turn of the millennium it was 1-to-1—meaning the average debt equaled the average annual starting salary. Today it’s over 2-to-1 and growing. That’s because debt has doubled in the past fifteen years, to a 2015 median of $156,000, while starting incomes have risen only 15 percent. The AVMA’s 2015 annual report charted a handy metric called “net present value.” This is the difference between what you’d earn as a vet over a lifetime, after paying off your debt, versus what you’d make if you hadn’t gone into vet medicine at all.

All other things being equal, women came out about $200,000 ahead. Men, who earn more across all fields, actually came out negative for the first time in 2014. (That said, they still start out earning slightly more than their female classmates.) Dr. Justine Lee, founder of the popular website VETgirl, worries it’s becoming a “pink-collar profession,” typecast as women’s work and compensated accordingly. Today, 80 percent of vet students are women, an astonishing turnaround since 1970, when 89 percent were men. The proportion of working vets who are women is 55 percent, and set to skyrocket as boomers retire.

What’s behind the debt problem is under some dispute, but the 2008 recession hit the field particularly hard. The number of pets and vet visits declined, dragging inflation-adjusted salaries down with them, even as the cost of tuition went up. Pet ownership and spending has recovered since, but not much. Maccabe of the AAVMC pins the tuition increase on the decline in state funding, which has hit public graduate schools hardest. (Almost all veterinary schools are in public land-grant universities.)

But there is no shortage of aspiring vets, and schools have made up for decreased funding by accepting more of them. This actually made the debt problem worse, because most of the additional students pay higher out-of-state tuition. Add to that a flood of students from foreign schools, which the AVMA has accredited rapidly in recent years. There will be nearly nine hundred grads from foreign programs this year, fully qualified to practice. And many of those schools, especially Ross University, a very big for-profit school in the Caribbean, cost more to attend.

There may soon be too many vets. At the very least there is too great a supply of pet-care services relative to demand. “I would say most vets do not encourage people to go into vet medicine,” says VETgirl’s Dr. Lee. And as supportive as she is of the community, she isn’t sure she’d advise young people to consider it today—“unless they’re very rich,” she says, half-joking. “If you’re passionate about it, absolutely consider it. You just have to be cognizant about the debt and the work-life balance.”

Vets may be awakening to the costs, but almost none of those I spoke with, regardless of age, specialty, or profession, would have made a different choice. (Whether they’d prefer a less crowded field of competitors is another question.) Very few of them personally regretted going into the field—not for all the debt, or the stress, or the long hours. Still, like Dr. Lee, they sounded a note of caution: go into the field with your eyes open. One vet surgeon, Jesse Terry, puts it this way. “I have a little son, and when he’s older I’ll tell him: ‘There’s a lot of fulfillment in this career, but you need to understand that you’re not going to get rich. There are easier ways to make a living, so if you’re going to do it you have to do it for the right reasons, and money isn’t it.’ ”

A graduating vet may not have thought much about debt during school, but all that changes when the first bill arrives. It’s against this backdrop that fewer than half of graduates go on to an internship—a year of rounds through various specialties—which is mandatory in human care but not in vet medicine. When I met Olivia Love, the intern who had chosen animal medicine over human because it was more hands-on, she was going through her emergency-room rotation—and visibly spent. She’d arrived at 6:30 a.m. and hoped to leave before 8:00 p.m., but a flood of emergencies that night would force her to stay until midnight. “I definitely have moments when I don’t want to be doing this anymore, and I think it’s a product of the internship.”

Some vets told me they considered internships to be little more than a source of cheap labor. But Love wasn’t the only one to tell me that she’d learned more in six exhausting months than in her last two years of vet school. For many students it’s a way of crossing potential specialties off the list—learning, for instance, that internal medicine requires a lot of overtime, or that critical care is too intense for them. The latter was Love’s conclusion. “Just general practice for me,” she says. “I need some time to recover.”

If you’re even thinking of specializing, an internship is a must. Some specialties require two—a year rotating through departments and a year in the chosen specialty. No one who achieves success in a specialty finds those requirements too onerous a burden. As one successful surgeon put it to me, “Those couple of years were a blink of an eye in the scope of my career.”

The career is what matters, of course. And the wonderful thing about vet medicine is that it’s not a single career but a whole universe of them. Each one is a distinct ecosystem, with its own quirks, challenges, and exhilarating moments of joy.

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CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL: ON THE FARM

Michael Lund decided against an internship. He thought only of heading back home—not exactly to the town where he grew up, but nearby, in the Badlands. Semi-arid big-sky plains stippled with scenic bluffs, this iconic American landscape represented “true cattle country” to Lund, a place o...