Monday February 21st 6:30 pm

Thank you to the people that attended the speaker presentation last
Monday. We had pizza and snacks and talked with two vets for over an hour.

Drs. Eric Anderson and Danica Salomun

Danika had known most of her life that she wanted to be a veterinarian.
She obtained animal experience with her own pets and worked in a vet
clinic on weekends while she was in undergraduate studies.  She decided to
attend OSU because it was public and did not require the VCAT (only the
GRE). 

After taking a year off and applying to OSU with Oregon residency,
Danika was accepted to the vet program in Corvallis.  While at OSU she
worked in the virology lab and CREAM (where she helped with the complete
maintenance of a dairy farm through the university).

Eric graduated in 1985 with a bs in horticulture, then worked as a
carpenter and travelled.  It wasn't until 1991 that he decided to go to
vet school.  He promptly got a job at a vet clinic to gain the needed
experience and took one year of science classes for the prerequisites.  He
graduated from Washington State after four years of vet school there
through the WICHE program).

They recommend getting some life experience and that it will help you get
into veterinary school (it helps you stand out from other students when
applying). 

As far as being on call for emergencies goes, it usually depends on the
size of the clinic and the availability of emergency hospitals in the area
(we have the emergency hospital in Springfield that takes some of the
after hours pressure off other local vets).  For large animals, the most
common calls are for those of colic and calf pulling.

Large animals have the benefit of getting out of the office more often and
having a change of scenery.  Having a mixed large/small specialty clinic
poses its own problems, like more demanding work and less repetition of
cases so you are continually learning new techniques, diseases, etc.  It
is also lower efficiency and profit because you have to have the machinery
for a greater size range of animals.

For exotic vet work, it is mostly husbandry knowledge that is helpful.
They recommended owning the pets you want to work on so that you know what
food to feed them, how to cage them, how to raise the young, etc.