Louisiana vs. Oklahoma vs. Texas vs. Minnesota

[texasvettech]

I’ve been accepted at Oklahoma and Louisiana for OOS positions for this fall, have interviewed at Texas for IS and will be interviewing at Minnesota for OOS in a few weeks. I’m having a terrible time trying to decide where I would want to go. I want to focus on zoo Med, Texas doesn’t have that but IS tuition and the brand new facility there is the biggest part of me still keeping it in the running.
I’m wondering if anyone had anything positive/negative to say about any of them that could help with my decision. How the program is laid out, the faculty/facilities, the class size, clubs, early hands on experience, etc.
Thanks in advance for any help!

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[MixedAnimals77]

I’ve been accepted at Oklahoma and Louisiana for OOS positions for this fall, have interviewed at Texas for IS and will be interviewing at Minnesota for OOS in a few weeks. I’m having a terrible time trying to decide where I would want to go. I want to focus on zoo Med, Texas doesn’t have that but IS tuition and the brand new facility there is the biggest part of me still keeping it in the running.
I’m wondering if anyone had anything positive/negative to say about any of them that could help with my decision. How the program is laid out, the faculty/facilities, the class size, clubs, early hands on experience, etc.
Thanks in advance for any help!

I highly encourage you to go to Texas because of the IS tuition. A&M is substantially cheaper by over 100k for COA+interest compared to all the other schools you listed. Zoo med doesn't pay great to begin with and is super competitive on top of it all. No program is worth that much more for that much of a difference-not in this profession. Not even if a person became a radiologist, one of the highest paid specialties.

As far as focusing on zoo med, just because it's not a huge portion at A&M doesn't mean there won't be plenty of opportunities for you. If it is a part of the field you are truly passionate about there are plenty of opportunities to get involved and network which is a huge part of breaking into that part of the field. Most of the focus for things like zoo med comes after graduation in internship and residency post DVM. This is true at all schools because their goal is to get you to the base level of practice when you are in vet school. Go where it's cheapest get your DVM and then do an internship at somewhere with a large zoo load.

As just some generalist things: Clubs are where you will get a lot of your hands on experience during the didactic years at the majority of schools, from hearing my colleagues at other schools involvement and experience through clubs seems relatively equal in the grand scheme of things. For facilities overall I urge you not to get hung up on like oh this school has a brand new MRI, or x wing of a hospital. Is it functional? Will you be able to learn what you need with existing infrastructure-yes? then it's sufficient. I say this because while the new things are great most practitioners do not have access to these things on the daily unless they are in academia. Plus eventually things get upgraded with time and money.

Paging @WildZoo for an exotics point of view. @supershorty for MN. @cdoconn for OK. You can also check out a few of the other factor threads as IDK anyone current at LSU or Texas.

 

[supershorty]

I'm going to page @SnowJ , @gabynicolex , and @hopefulequinedr because the longer I'm out of the DVM curriculum, the less useful my information is becoming because it's out of date. I'm also copy/pasting an answer that I'd written on another thread because I was more articulate that day than I'm managing to be right now.

Overall: I feel like we're a tight-knit community and very supportive of each other, not just within our class but from one class to another. Minnesota works pretty hard to foster the attitude that we're not competing with each other anymore; we had to compete to get here, but now we are all colleagues and need to support one another through the program. I'm quite introverted, so I don't tend to hang out with my classmates outside of school (aside from my close friend group), but people who want to definitely do some fun stuff. I'm one of those freaky people who genuinely loved most of my time in vet school (which isn't to say I wasn't stressed to the max sometimes - I definitely was) and I think a lot of that is due to the collegiality here.

Faculty: The faculty here are, IMO, the best part of the school. I have yet to meet a faculty member who didn't genuinely want us to learn and understand what they teach us, and because everyone is teaching their particular specialty, I feel like they're as excited to teach us as we are to learn. We also do fun things with our faculty - there's an annual trivia night (you get to find out which professors are super competitive people [it's the pathologists, it's always the pathologists]) and there at least used to be an annual skit night, where the first years would do skits making fun of the faculty and the faculty would do skits making fun of them. It was a lot of fun and was very popular when my class did it, but the professor who oversaw skit night has been busy with other aspects of life, so I'm not sure if it's still a thing at this point. There are some new faculty and the structure of first year is different from when I was in the program, so I'm not sure about how some of those early classes run at this point.

Program layout: right now we do the standard 3 years of didactic curriculum, 1 year of clinics. But that being said, we have hands-on labs starting first week of first year, and between our courses and all of the amazing clubs we have, there are a lot of opportunities to do some really cool things. I know you said you're interested in zoo med, and I'm not really involved with zoo med stuff but I know our zoo med club has done some crazy cool wetlabs like fish surgeries. We have a mix of traditional lecture-based and problem-based learning. One course during 3rd year is exclusively PBL and it was my favorite class of vet school even though it's an area of medicine that I'm not heading into. I genuinely loved that class and got so much out of it. I've gotten a lot of hands-on experience right out of the gate, but I'm the type of person who will awkwardly follow faculty around and ask if I can shadow them until they say yes to make me go away. We do track, but it really doesn't come into play until second semester of 3rd year (so right before clinics).

Clubs: holy wow there are so many clubs, if you have an interest in something, we probably have a club or 3 that would suit you!

Personal pros:
1.) We don't have a dress code.
2.) All of our lectures are livestreamed and recorded, which is super swell for study purposes.
3.) We have a lot of exams, which I like because it helps me focus my studying and also means that we have a little bit of a buffer if we have an off day. You get used to it and it really can help you prioritize what you need to study for that day/week.
4.) The research opportunities being at a huge public university with so many professional programs on one campus are insanely good.
5.) We have a raptor center right across from the small animal hospital, so if birds are your thing, there are a lot of chances to see them over there. I am afraid of birds. I have been in the raptor center 1 time. It was still pretty cool.

Personal cons:
1.) The weather here kind of stinks sometimes
2.) Minnesota drivers are literally the worst drivers I've ever encountered.
3.) Tuition is expensive for OOS.

 

[SnowJ]

Following supershorty with a much less well written support for UMN:
The classes are very supportive of each other and we feel like a real community. My class has done a ton of cool things outside of the social events the school puts on for us and we have a lot of fun! We of course get stressed but we always have each other's backs.
Our faculty is behind us a majority of the time too; they want us to succeed and they do everything they can to help us do so. There's the occasional teacher that is difficult, but that's usually from personality differences and not because of lack of passion on their part.

If zoo is your thing; there are electives almost every semester that focus on non-traditional or zoo med; these are taught either by our professor who works at one of the two local zoos or our incredibly passionate exotics pathologist. I didn't take the elective myself but there is one that lets you go and see procedures with animals at the actual zoo and get some real hands-on experience! We also have an insanely active zoo and wildlife club with lots of great lunch lectures and other events. There's a club for basically any and all interests and a ton of great opportunities to get hands on experience as early as first year.

You can PM me with any specific questions if you'd like!