VMCAS, I hate you

So VMCAS opens in a week for next year's cycle - which means it's just about application time. The good news is there exists this nice and convenient place to fill out a single primary application for many of the vet schools out there. The bad news is that place is VMCAS. Obviously, from the title of this post, I had some issues with VMCAS. That might just be me though. There is also the possibility that a lot of the issues I had have been changed/fixed since last year. My main issue with VMCAS was that it was set up to be way more tedious than it needed to be. I'll explain in a second but first let me just talk about the application in general.

The first thing you need to do is designate/set up your Evaluators section. You want to make sure to give your evaluators plenty of time. The second thing you need to do is start on your personal statement, if you have not already. I won't lie - I didn't start my personal statement until July but in my opinion the sooner you start, the better. I don't think you actually need the full four months to write your personal statement. I just suggest starting right away because you'll need good amount of time between drafts/rewrites to just forget about it for a while before you go back and read over it again. Write a draft. Read through it and edit it yourself. Send it to anyone you know who will be honest and give you good input on it. Take their comments into consideration and edit it accordingly. Continue to do all this until you think you have your final draft. Then - take a month break. Forget about it and work on other parts of your application. After a month, come back to your draft and go through all the steps again. Continue this until you run out of time. I had six "official drafts" for my personal statement and I only saved it as a new "draft" if there were drastic differences between my current draft and the previous one. I compared my original draft and my final draft after all was said and done, and you wouldn't believe how much it changed. After comparing them, it was hard to believe that for a short period of time I was happy with my original draft.

As for the rest of the application on VMCAS, I would fill out the basics of the basics first. This includes: address in formation, personal data, background information, high school, previous professional & undergraduate enrollments, institutions attended, tests, and other/previous applications. I don't remember having any issues with any of those sections. I think they were pretty straight forward. The first section where I ran into a problem was the "Parent/Guardian" section and that is mainly because it asked for information that not even my parents knew the answers to, like the exact date that my father and the exact date that my mother became residents of Florida.

The other two sections I left out from above are the "Experiences" section and the "Coursework" one. These two sections are an example of what I meant earlier when I said the application was set up to be way more tedious than it needs to be. The reason for that in the Experiences section is that they want you to list everything in order from most recent to oldest. This wouldn't be an issue except that it is set up so that you can not edit the order you enter them in. So if you forget something or if you get a new job between when you start filling out this section and when the application is due then you need to start all over since that new job would now be the "most recent" and would have to be entered in first. Hopefully they changed this set up for this cycle of applications. As for the Coursework section - I just found the method required for entering the information to be very annoying. If they haven't changed it, I think you'll soon agree. Nonetheless, it's very simple - just tedious.

Despite my issues with some of the ways VMCAS is set up, I couldn't be more thankful for the convenience of the service. Sorry for the sudden end to this post (it's getting kind of long anyway). If anyone is interested, I can have at least one more post about the application since I'm sure there many things I forgot to talk about in this one.

Choosing where to apply

In applying to veterinary school, I honestly don't believe there is such a thing as a safe school. Personally, I was admitted to my top choice without evening getting into my "safe school" on the list of schools to which I applied (and by "safe school" I mean the one I originally thought I had the best chance of getting into). That just goes to show that the admissions for each school might not be what you think. So in choosing where to apply I would consider a few main things:

• Total cost of tuition and living (keep in mind that most schools will not allow you to switch to in-state tuition at any point during the entire 4 years)
• Location: can you picture yourself actually living there and not being miserable for 4 years?
• What type of vet you want to be (and if that school has a program that will suite you well) if you already know that
• Each school's minimum requirements and if you'll meet them (keep in mind some schools do have alternate eligibility options as well)

When I was applying some people would tell me things like "Apply to so-and-so, they'll love you" and "Don't apply to so-and-so, they won't accept you." I do believe there are some truths to that type of advice sometimes but only when it comes from someone who is really "in the know." Many people are often misinformed, and also, sometimes there is just something about you that a school likes. So, my advice is if there's a school you really want to go to but you've heard your chances of getting in are low, do it - apply. You never know.


In terms of deciding how many schools to apply to - that I do not know. Applying is expensive and the more schools you apply to, the more expensive it gets. If you have the money, apply to more (if there are more that fit your criteria). I don't think applying to too many schools will look bad but I can't promise you that since I am not "in the know" on that. I can tell you that I only applied to 5 schools and shortly after my applications had all been sent in and the deadlines had passed I had quickly began to regret not applying to more. Of course, after I got an acceptance letter, I was no longer regretting that choice. But, those four months before that letter came were pretty bad. If you feel like I felt (you don't want to apply to a lot of schools) and you feel like you can't narrow down your list anymore based on the above mentioned criteria then maybe even take into consideration the application itself: Does that school use VMCAS or will you have to fill out an entirely separate application? How much will that cost? How much do the different supplemental applications cost and what do they ask for? I wouldn't use the application itself as a primary means to choose between schools but maybe just as a last case thing - if you really need to narrow it down and feel like you have no other way. And speaking of the application, I think my next post will probably be about VMCAS and maybe about the application process in general.

I did it...

...I got in! And that's only the beginning...

For being only the beginning, it was quite the journey, though. Decidedly, the journey started for me less than two years ago. Unofficially, it started when I was born. I grew up with a small animal veterinarian for a mother and I loved going into the office with her whenever I could. For a long time, I thought I wanted to be a vet but I actually started to doubt it more and more as I got older. Since my mom was my most prominent role model growing up, I wasn't sure how big of an influence her career choice was having on mine. So when I started college at the University of Florida four years ago I spent a lot of time exploring many different fields of study and possible future careers. I quickly and undoubtedly decided to major in Mathematics. To this day I do not regret that decision. I did love and still do love math classes. I, however, never felt that same way towards any career involving mathematics. Two years into my undergraduate career I was still completely undecided on what I wanted to do. With so many possible careers to consider, veterinary medicine had been pushed to the back of my mind. At the end of my sophomore year of college I got my border collie, River. That was when everything changed. Getting a dog brought the field of veterinary medicine back into my life. Like any obsessed dog owner, I shared any and every story about River with anyone who would listen, including my mom. It quickly became commonplace for my mom and I to have extended conversations about River and all of her minor injuries (being a very active and playful border collie who spent a lot of time playing outside she would injure herself in a wide multitude of ways - run into a tree, bite her tongue, scrape up her pads, conjunctivitis, etc. - luckily nothing was ever bad enough to require more than an inquiry with my mom and maybe some eye drops in the mail). Suddenly, I knew, without a doubt, what I wanted to do and I wondered how I hadn't figured this out sooner. I started to get lots of "I always knew you'd become a vet" from friends and family. Apparently almost everyone in my life knew about my career choice before I did. I'm glad no one tried to persuade or push me towards it, though, since I feel like I could never really feel confident about my choice if I hadn't done all the experimenting with other possibilities and come back to it on my own. Granted, it would have been nice to have known sooner - since not deciding until junior year required me to have to squeeze in A LOT of prerequisites into my last two years of college. But I did it....and I got in.....and that's only the beginning.