Help for every stage of your veterinary career
A theme we have encountered before is individuals unable or unwilling to ask mentors for letters of recommendation or for help with their professional progression. This is evidently true for so many applicants because I STILL get applications that are just Not Good. The applications clearly haven’t been vetted by a mentor. Why in the
I have already advised you to make sure you ask for a GOOD letter of recommendation. The problem is, you usually can’t see the letter before it is submitted, so it’s impossible to know if it is good or not. Nonetheless, there are some features of letters of recommendation that you want to make sure
I had the good fortune to be able to present some topics near and dear to my heart at the 2019 SAVMA Symposium held in Athens, GA in March. I presented on Medical Error, was on a panel about Internships, and presented Preparing For and Securing an Internship. I wasn’t sure what would happen with
This year, I spoke at the SAVMA Symposium about internships and how to maximize your chances to get them. I got a surprising number of questions about grades. “I hear some programs care about grades a lot.” “Do programs look at your transcripts?” “Our classes are these amalgamated courses so we don’t get many different
Let’s say you follow my heartfelt, strongest advice and have other people review your application materials. Congratulations, you just put yourself in the top 50% of applicants! Now, you get feedback from your friends and mentors. Unfortunately, some of the feedback conflicts. For example, one of your helpers comments, “Be careful not to come off
In my post giving about advice on how to maximize your time during vet school for success, I mentioned getting time working with underserved/marginalized/low socioeconomic status (UML for the purposes of this article) groups. One of my editors said, “Why?” I thought that was a great question and deserved its own article. As always, this
Before we start, you should know that every program does their intern selection process differently. Evaluators care about different things. Some may use class rank as a cut point- they don’t evaluate anyone not in the top 25%, for example. (You can’t do anything about this so stop worrying about it). Some may have a
I thought it would be helpful to share my personal process for reading an internship application. This is a highly personalized process- please don’t assume that others go through the same process. Nonetheless, I thought it would be helpful to share what goes through my brain, so here it is: First, the internship application through
I thought it would be valuable to share my own methods with how I evaluate applications for vet schools, internship, residency, and faculty positions. As always, evaluators are a widely varied lot and many may disagree with me on some of these points. Many of my colleagues share my opinions, too. Take the perspective with
This is a specialized version of a post I have about general application letter writing advice, aimed at intern applicants. Writing an internship application letter is hard. I’m sorry. Intern applicant evaluators are so widely varied, you can’t possibly write the ideal letter unless you happen to A) know the evaluators and B) apply to