There’s a big difference between reading about common injuries in farm animals and treating a horse’s wound in real time while its owner watches anxiously.
A major challenge for students planning to go into veterinary medicine is the gap between expectation and reality. Faculty from OSU’s Carlson College of Veterinary Medicine and College of Agricultural Sciences are addressing that gap with a study abroad program in Mexico where students work with animals alongside licensed veterinarians.
“Only about a quarter of all students who start out pre-vet will actually graduate pre-vet, and just a tiny percentage will make it to vet school. So how can I help?” said José Uscanga Aguirre, coordinator of student outreach and recruitment in CAS. “My dissertation research was on the value of study abroad for pre-veterinary students to become veterinarians. We try to expose the students to the reality of the profession as closely as we can.”
Jared McClure, a senior majoring in biology, went on the trip this year and got real world experiences like treating wounds on horses.
This year’s trip from June 16-27 was the second from OSU, but Uscanga started bringing pre-veterinary students to Mexico in 2018 when working at Oklahoma State University with Dr. Kelsey Jurek, who now works in large animal emergency medicine at the Lois Bates Acheson Veterinary Teaching Hospital.
Uscanga’s role in Oklahoma was similar to his work here in Agricultural Sciences, where animal sciences is one of the college’s largest departments and the majority of students in the major choose the pre-veterinary medicine option.
“A lot of students I knew would have a hard time going through the pre-requisites like chemistry and also not being able to fulfill the hands-on veterinary experience requirements for veterinary school,” which average 2,000 hours, he said. “There’s a lot of research about how difficult it can be for ag students to realize they may need to consider a backup plan, and advisers have a hard time getting them to see that.”
