It's not tax season, it's financial aid season

What's the difference? Financial aid season is just like tax season, except you have to fill out 3 times the number of forms, answer questions about this year's taxes, last year's taxes, NEXT year's taxes, AND your parents taxes, turn them in a month earlier, and instead of giving you a refund and sending you on your merry way, the government gives you a loan and tells you to keep in touch with Sallie Mae. My parents may not be able to claim me as a dependent anymore, but Sallie Mae sure as heck could....

In addition to the boring financial information, my Institute of Higher Education also collects a personal statement. Theoretically, I know what I want to do when I grow up, because I'm in vet school, right? Wrong. The beauty of vet school is that you don't actually have to decide what you want to be! I've taken to calling it the liberal arts of science and medicine. Amazingly, when I sat down to write my personal statement, the words flowed effortlessly, and I like what I ended up with enough to share it.

Before I started college, my response to the question "What are you going to be when you grow up?" was, unwaveringly, "An equine vet!" As I made my way through four years of undergraduate study, I realized my interests ranged far and wide. I majored in biology and minored in psychology and chemistry. I especially loved microbiology and immunology, but also truly enjoyed classes I took in political science, art, and American studies. For awhile I wanted to be a vet pathologist, then a behaviorist, then a vet in public health, and then a research scientist. After an internship on a dairy farm, I thought for sure I had found exactly what I wanted to be-a dairy vet! Eventually, I realized that going to vet school would afford me the opportunity to pursue any and all of these interests, and that I wouldn't have to pick just one of the ways of practicing veterinary medicine. That being said, I am still in love with dairy cows, and plan on working with them in some capacity. I could be a rural mixed animal practitioner, a general large animal practitioner, a food production vet, a public health vet, a vet who lobbies Congress on behalf of the dairy industry, a vet who discovers a new treatment for mastitis, or an equine vet who has a hobby dairy farm. More likely, that list wasn't a list of many different career paths, but a list of many stops along one career path. I am not sure what I will do immediately after graduation, but feel quite certain that my career will include research and teaching in addition to clinical practice. In the meantime, I've found plenty to keep me busy outside the lecture hall. I put in a few hours a week working in the pharmacy, and I also work in Dr. Got Milk's lab, feeding and milking the cows in his mastitis research studies. I joined the veterinary fraternity, and am currently serving in the position of alumni chair. I have also just gotten back into riding horses, and look forward to my weekly lesson with the same anticipation I did when I was 6. Maybe I'll be an equine vet after all...