Our student vet blogger Joe is now coming to the end of his course, and looking beyond his final exams to life in practice. For his 100th blog, we asked him to write about his time in the clinical years at vet school.
As a final year veterinary student studying at the University of Nottingham, I have been very lucky among students to continue my studies throughout the tumultuous 2020. In fact, I have only a few months until my final exams, and then a few months more until I will start caring for pets as a qualified vet! It’s so exciting and a little bit scary. But how did I reach this point?
Today I will focus on my studies as a clinical vet student in my final years of study, and my future. If you’d like to know more about my earlier time at university, please read one of my earlier blogs here or here. As before, my experiences are all unique to me, and every vet student will have different experiences, particularly those at other universities.
Fourth Year and the Start of Clinical Years
The start of fourth year meant the start of clinical training. Clinical training was a move away from the theory and basics of veterinary science, and a move towards learning how to practise veterinary medicine. Nottingham is good in that we have a lot of clinical teaching early on, but fourth year was when it really ramped up and took priority.
In fourth year lectures, compared to non-clinical lectures that focussed on anatomy and physiology, we now focussed more on the sorts of diseases that affect animals’ bodies, building on the earlier teaching. We would learn how to approach an animal with disease, investigate the cause, and how to treat them. This meant there were a lot more practical sessions to practise these skills. I found learning to use an ultrasound machine particularly enjoyable! Nottingham teaches their course by breaking it up into body systems – for example, we covered all the diseases of the cardiorespiratory system, then the gastrointestinal system, the neurological system, and so on. I quite liked this way of learning as it kept us from getting too overwhelmed with multiple body systems.
Throughout our Christmas, Easter and summer holidays, we also had to undertake clinical placements. This primarily meant going into veterinary practices, shadowing the vets and nurses, and getting more chances to develop what we had been taught at university. I loved placement. Every day I was understanding more and more and feeling more like a real vet.
Veterinary medicine is unique in how the older generation guides and teaches students and new graduates. I cannot think of any other industry where you are given so much opportunity to get involved as a student. Of course, placements involve long hours and means we have less time off than other university students. But we know that it is critical to always be practising the skills we will need as vets, so it’s a worthy sacrifice.
Final Year
Fourth year exams ended and it was time to start our final year. COVID caused quite a bit of disruption to this year but on the whole it was delivered relatively normally, so I won’t focus on the changes. Final year is almost all practical based, split into university-organised rotations and more student-organised placements.
University rotations involved us working at the vet school with veterinary clinicians or visiting veterinary practices linked with the university. These structured experiences gave us the chance to practise the wide variety of skills we needed to qualify as vets – we call these ‘day one competencies‘. Basically, they are skills that every vet should be able to do as soon as they qualify, and cover things like diagnosing and treating basic diseases, taking blood, giving drugs, putting in catheters, performing clinical examinations, performing research, and much more.
Passing rotations tells the RCVS (the organisation that permits vets to be vets!) that we are competent enough to qualify. There was a nice variety of rotations Nottingham had organised, from first opinion to referral vets, from small animal vets to farm and equine practices. I found I enjoyed the referral medicine quite a lot – although it is not an area I want to go into, it was useful to see the advanced cases they investigated and treated for my own knowledge. Performing surgery with university lecturers was also a great experience. We had over 20 weeks of rotations to complete.
Placements were much the same as in fourth year. They are important because they offer students the chance to work in vet practices in the field they are interested in. In my case, I knew I wanted to work in small animal first opinion (“general practice”) medicine, so focussed on practices that provided this service. As before, we had the chance to practise what we had learnt at university and on rotations, see how a veterinary practice operates, and maybe even get a foot in the door when we start to look for a job after graduation. We had 26 weeks of placements to complete over fourth and fifth year. I had done a lot in fourth year, so had more time off in fifth year. Since COVID meant many practices were not accepting students for safety reasons, I was glad to have ticked off a lot of weeks before.
As of now, I have finished my rotations and have only one placement left! Then I’ll have my study leave to revise for exams, and then my finals. A whole week of non-stop exams. Not looking forward to that.
Ups and Downs
For me, final year has not been the most challenging year (that dubious honour falls to fourth year…) but it has definitely been the most intense and the biggest learning curve. The transition from theory to practice is huge, and it’s taken me a long time to move away from that mind-set. I still have much to learn! For example, with a disease like kidney failure, our lectures give us all the information on how we can investigate, treat and manage it in a perfect world.
But in the real world it is not always so simple. Clients may not have enough money for a full investigation, the animal may not be able to be tested in every way, certain drugs may not be appropriate in some patients, some diseases do not react the way you would expect, and so on. Adjusting to treating patients in the most practical way, rather than the optimum, has been difficult to learn. I feel it just needs experience to grasp, which I will pick up over time.
Remember earlier I said Nottingham likes to teach diseases in body systems? While I like this method for the earlier years, it was a struggle to adapt this for practice. When a sick dog comes in, you can’t just think about the GI system for investigation. You have to consider the urinary system, the endocrine system, the cardiorespiratory system, maybe the neurological system; nothing is ever as formulaic as in theory (and I like things to be formulaic!). This has been another big learning curve for me.
And finally, the intensity of the year itself was quite a surprise. I was lucky (or unlucky) to have a lot of time off over summer and autumn during the early pandemic, but 2021 for me has been much busier. I’ve had whole months of nothing but placement or rotation with only weekends off – adjusting to a Monday to Friday, 9 to 6 schedule has been challenging! And I’m still struggling, particularly because COVID makes our timetables so unstable. I’m actually looking forward to having a regular job so I can get into a schedule. It doesn’t help that I like to use a lot of my time off to write up notes or study (or write blogs!). Definitely a workaholic…
The Future
I only have a few more months until my exams at the end of May, then I have some time off before I start working! Looking for a job has been another stress in 2021, but I’m glad to have got it sorted early. Some students prefer to find a job early, like me, while others prefer to wait until after graduation. Luckily, vets are still in high demand and there are plenty of jobs out there.
But getting a job doesn’t mean we stop learning! Although we are competent enough to pass exams and quality, we still have a lot to learn. The first year, or so I’ve heard, is the biggest learning curve there is. So much cannot be taught at university and is learnt on the job. I’m expecting my first few months to be exhausting and full of constant learning. It is really important as a new graduate vet that we get support from more experienced vets – as our industry is so good at teaching the younger generation, I hope that we will all get this.
However, even with the best support there is, we will still be under a lot of pressure. Many new grads say they feel like they are just ‘treading water’ and just about keeping up. These stresses are one of the reasons a lot of new graduate vets decide to leave veterinary medicine early. It’s sad – we’re getting better at supporting new graduates, but there’s still a lot to be done.
How You Can Help Me (and other graduates)
As a pet owner, you are going to meet new graduate vets very soon, myself included. I want you to try and remember what I’ve told you today, about how long our course is, how much training we have to go through, how much time we have to give up to get here, and how even this isn’t enough to fully prepare us. We do this not for money (our salaries are about equivalent to a teacher), or for fame (there aren’t too many celebrity vets!) but because we love animals. We care, sometimes too much for our own good!
You should be kind to everyone, including vets. But please be especially kind to young new grad vets – we will be tired, stressed, have overflowing scatterbrains, and perhaps be a little cranky. But we are there for you and your animals because we care, and we want to do the best we can for all the pets out there. If you feel like we haven’t done what you asked or the outcome wasn’t positive, don’t be angry and shout and scream. Be polite and talk to us so we can learn from our mistakes and improve. We are all humans, so treat us as you’d like to be treated.
I hope you have learnt a little more about how vet students become vets, the challenges we face at university and in our first months of practice, and how we can help each other make veterinary medicine a better industry for all. The veterinary class of 2021 will be seeing the UK’s pets very soon!
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