BToW: Second Guesses

"Tell us about an experience that made you doubt your ability or desire to go into vet med. How did you end up overcoming that doubt?"

I'm going to put my own spin on this, because honestly, once I started, I never really did. Mostly because I had awesome people in my corner cheering me on insisting that I could do it. I had set backs, sure, a few poor grades (I'm looking at you organic chemistry) and I was rejected one year, only to be waitlisted and subsequently called off the waitlist the next year. But there wasn't a time when I went, "Whoa, can I really do this?"

Instead, I'm going to tell you why I never considered vet med in the first place. It boils down to 1) not realizing that it was an option for me and 2) a horrible high school biology teacher. I'm an anomaly. It seems like everyone I meet has wanted to be a vet since they were little kids. I don't think it ever occurred to me. I wanted to be a singer, an actor, a writer, a paleontologist (c'mon EVERY kid wanted that, right?), and even the Prime Minister. My mother and father frequently insisted that I had to be a "doctor or a lawyer" because my handwriting was (and still is) atrocious.* Sure, I had pets. Wagger, Esmeralda, Max, Bailey, Gabby, Bun-Bun, Topaz, Coquette... But medicine in any form had never jumped out as an option to me. I don't know how much was that I didn't want to, and how much was that I just considered it was out of reach for me. I was smart; but I wasn't A+ and I figured that you needed to be to be a doctor or vet. So I just never even had it on the list.

In high school, I largely considered myself an artsy type. History, politics, literature, art... That was my scene. Math and science were things that I was good at, but couldn't stand, and was mostly just getting through. Math wasn't too bad - I liked trigonometry for it's little problem solving puzzles. I HATED biology. Our teacher was not the most modern of educators. What do I remember from Biology 11? Learning mitosis and meiosis for the 10th time in my life, dissecting a frog, and learning about fruitflies. I don't remember what I learned about fruitflies, just that we talked about them. So thoroughly turned off from science, I enrolled in a Bachelor of Journalism program. And then promptly dropped out after one year ("I'm never getting a job with this, what was I thinking??"). I realized during the next year that what made me the happiest was being at the barn with my horse. That led to applying to an equine science program (which I was rejected from), which led to a vet assistent program. During the assistant program, I realized more than animals, I loved medicine. It was also when my vet said to me, "I don't understand. Why do you want to be an assistant? You have what it takes, why don't you just go be a vet?"

In a way, the assistant program was a bit of a wasted year. But I needed it. I needed someone to show me how fantastic science and medicine could be and I needed someone to show me that I could do it.

*The lawyer part also came from my tendency to find the tiniest loophole in any argument and argue it into the ground. Love you, Mom.