The most common questions that I get asked by friends who are not involved in vet med concern the fourth-year clinical rotations. Misconceptions abound, probably fostered in part by the many popular hospital dramas that over-simplify everything. This is definitely a blog-worthy topic!
What I'm going to describe applies to the great majority of vet schools that have teaching hospitals. Surprisingly, there are vet schools that do not have teaching hospitals attached to them. Their students still have to do fourth-year clinical rotations but they have to take them at another school. Sometimes there are formal arrangements between schools, and sometimes the students have to arrange these activities themselves. OSU has a large teaching hospital, so for the most part, OSU vet med students complete their core rotations here.
The fourth year of a vet med education consists of those core clinical rotations and a certain number of weeks of internships (e.g., taking a course at another university) or preceptorships (working with a vet in an environment such as a clinic or dairy farm). Most vet schools require students to declare a "track" in their third year. Large Animal, Small Animal, General, and something like Non-Traditional are typical tracks. The differences between the tracks are not huge and mainly take the form of more or fewer weeks available in the year's schedule to spend in internships/preceptorships.
Vet schools use the same clinical rotation scheduling software that nearly all human med schools use. It is clunky and fairly shitty but that's just the way of it. I've known my fourth-year schedule for some months now. Minor tweaks are possible but big changes are often not approved.
Core clinical rotations consist of anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks spent in a particular service area of the teaching hospital. The "big four" rotations are small animal (SA) medicine, SA surgery, large animal (LA) medicine, and LA surgery. There are also rotations in imaging (mainly radiology but our school also has equipment for MRI and CT), anesthesia, cardiology, oncology, theriogenology (AKA reproduction), rural veterinary practice (farm calls), diagnostic services (largely pathology and necropsy through the Oregon state vet lab which is housed in the teaching hospital), clinical pathology (laboratory analysis of fluids and tissues from patients submitted by LA and SA services), and SA ICU (can be day or overnight shifts) and LA hospital overnights.
Finally, OSU has an unusual clinical rotation that I don't think any other vet school offers. Through a long-standing partnership with the Oregon Humane Society in Portland, every OSU vet student spends three weeks with OHS doing lots and lots of spays and neuters. That is actually my first rotation.
Every track has a set number of elective hours that a student is required to take. These are courses that we take at OSU. They are compressed into one or two weeks and do not stretch out over a full term like a regular course. I took most of my electives in my third year so only have one left to take next year. It's worth pointing out that if I took a similar "elective" at another school, it would count as an "internship" for my vet med program at OSU.
For three years, my class has been moving through our program as a cohort. The big change comes on Monday. There are two or three students per rotation, but every student has a different rotation order. As a result, I will not see around two-thirds of my classmates at all next year. Literally not see them--our rotation schedules are so different that we may not even be in the state at the same time, much less in the teaching hospital at the same time.
On top of all of that, each student has to arrange internships and preceptorships for the gaps in his or her schedule. Our vet school lacks any sort of career services, and all of us have to find and arrange those internships on our own. We also have to pay travel, food, and lodging for those weeks IN ADDITION to paying tuition for that time. It's a racket, plain and simple. I have arranged some preceptorships that I will not officially put on my schedule so I don't have to pay the tuition for them.
If you are observant, you will have noticed that one thing that I have not talked about is vacation. That's because there is none. You may have a week here and there that you didn't fill with an internship but that's all you get. It will be a year-long push to the end goal: the DVM.
I think this is a decent introduction to fourth-year vet student rotations. The next post will be about the national board exam. It's on all of our minds!
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