In my long experience with small and large animal vets, which includes gossip from a friend who is a career vet tech, many vets tend to suffer from poor business management (most operate out of a small office with a few others and are their own bosses), or poor people skills (they didn’t go into it because they want to work with people all day, but that’s what they do).
It’s a hard profession. Unlike doctors, when they give unheeded advice, it is not the advisee who suffers, it is their innocent pet. Unlike human medicine, if someone either can’t afford or doesn’t want to bother with medical care, they can just opt to euthanize the animal. Or even cheaper, dump it on a country road and drive away.
There is a lot of depression. And suicide.
Rural vets don’t make much money – I know my goat vet charged me about half of what a dog vet would for similar work. Of course they don’t have to capitalize as much as a pet vet – they generally work out of a truck.
I think you really have to have a strong vocation for it, not just a ‘well, I love animals’.
I’m a veterinary pathologist and work with lab animals. I discovered fairly quickly in vet school that I wouldn’t want to go into practice and have to deal with clients, so I decided to go into pathology instead and don’t regret the choice. The pay is better than the $84,000 **Habeed **mentioned, and I generally just work 8:00-5:00.
3-4 years of college, and you need top shelf grades. Anything less than near-perfect, and your son will not get in to veterinary school. Medical school is much easier.
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This is not true. You don’t have to have a 4.0 GPA to be a vet. Good grades, yes. Other things (like animal experience, reputation of school, evidence of leadership and extracurriculars) can make up for an imperfect GPA. Especially if you express an interest in going into high-need areas, like food animal medicine.
It’s hard to get into vet school, but it’s actually become less competitive in the last 10 years. So this should not scare someone away from applying. Especially if they are male.
Yes, the curriculum is hard. But most students graduate and successfully pass their board exams.
None of which is required to be a licensed vet. You can graduate with a DVM and immediately start practicing. Residencies are usually for specialists.
Anyone interested in going into vet med should talk to recent grads to gauge what they are getting themselves into. The profession is in the process of evolving so what was true years ago is not necessarily the case now. That said, a recent study determined that the ROI on a DVM is pretty crappy overall, but this is highly dependent on what career path one takes (fortunately, I’m in a profitable path) and the amount of debt incurred from training.
Another factor to consider may be the work environment. The doctors I know all have to deal with unreasonable requirements from insurers, lots of paperwork, regulations, etc. Really they spend a great deal of their time on this kind of thing. I would imagine most of that would not apply to a veterinary practice.
I say he should go for it, if he really feels this is his calling. ROI only measures tangible costs/gains, not intangibles. Even though I identify most strongly as an epidemiologist, there is a lot of pride that comes from being a veterinarian. Our training does cause us to see the world in a more holistic way, I think.
The choice for me never boiled down to vet medicine vs human medicine. The latter just wasn’t what I saw myself doing, so it wasn’t on my list at all. (Ironically, most of my work now concerns people since I’m in public health, go figure.) Your son very well might be wired the same way.
My daughter has been looking into it, influenced by a mother who was a registered vet tech. I am trying to talk her out of it - partly as the guy who will have to write a lot of large checks, and partly because of the dismal prospects.
In short, my semi-eddicated understanding is that there are almost no fields where the disparity between difficulty of acceptance at a good school, cost of school, and then career opportunities are so grossly out of whack. It’s kill yourself to get into a first-line school to pay $300k for the degrees to come out to… internships and $30k staff positions. In a field that continues to move away from the kindly old Doc Winters model to a cold, computer-driven, corporate suckhole. (I know two vets who quit because they couldn’t sustain their “family practice” and refused to sell out to VCA or such.)
I’ve had a lot of animals. While I don’t expect even a long-time vet to do things like euth a cat for free… I had my boy Maine Coon put down around 2000 (back abscess that got into his spinal fluid) and the doctor just looked at me and said, “make a donation to the city SPCA, whatever you think is fair.” I had a terrible incident where I ran over a neighborhood cat (no one’s, sort of) and rushed it to my vet of about 2010, for a very quick evaluation and euth, and was hit with a 4-page, $300 bill that included gauze and tape.
Y’know, there’s no reason for human medicine to be like that, much less animal medicine. I think most who aim at the field are fantasizing about James Herriott stories and the vet they had when they were a kid.
In light of you with the face’s comments I recalled that the US military employs some number of veterinarians in epidemiological and related roles. It’s an officer position and pays fairly well in a middle class way, though nobody gets rich as an officer.
I have no clue about supply and demand, or how the career pans out over decades, but it’s an odd out of the way niche that the OP’s son might have otherwise overlooked. Perhaps it’s worth investigating.
I used to work with a vet who went into the Air Force because they paid for her vet school. We used to jokingly call her Major Doctor. She didn’t give two shits about being in the military; just used it as a means to an end.
I knew a guy who was drafted into the military (Korea? WW II?) right after his veterinary school graduation. He told me his primary/only job was food safety, something he had no interest in and not much knowledge about. So he faked it.
But generally the vets do not file. If you the owner have pet insurance then you generally pay the bill to the vet and submit to get reimbursed; it is seamless to the vet. Or so I’ve been told.
Then again most of us docs don’t deal with the paperwork ourselves. It impacts us, to be sure, in many ways, but we have complete systems built to deal with it.
To the vets out there - speaking of the work environment … anyone employed by a large animal hospital chain? What is that work environment like?