You'll never guess what senior track I picked

Just kidding. I'm tracking small animal. Hope I didn't surprise you there.

My class has to select our "tracks" (which actually apply for our next 1.5 years of school) by the end of this week.

The three options at my vet school are: small animal, large animal, or general (a combination of small and large).

Some other vet schools have additional choices, like exotics, wildlife, food animal specific, equine specific, or "build-your-own-track." Guess my school just likes to keep things simple.

Tracking starts to affect our curriculum this coming spring. It doesn't affect our rotations in junior practicum, but everybody takes different classes in the afternoon depending on your track: Small Animal Medicine & Surgery I and II, or Large Animal Medicine & Surgery plus Bovine Herd Medicine.

Senior year is where it makes a big difference. (To review, senior year = all rotations + no classes. Basically it's as though we're working in the hospital [except we have to pay $25-50K for the privilege, and we have to work about twice as hard with longer hours than anyone else; but I'm sure it "builds character"].)

My 48 weeks of small animal track breaks down as follows:

* 3 weeks of anesthesia (really intense)
* 2 weeks of cardiology (tough but good to know)
* 4 weeks of ER/critical care (I *think* only 1 of the 4 weeks is actually a scheduled overnight shift, and the other 3 are a mix of daytime and evening hours)
* 4 weeks of community practice (healthy pet appointments, primary workups of ill animals, dentistry, spay/neuter, and shelter medicine)
* 2 weeks of dermatology (skin! not stressful!)
* 3 weeks of diagnostic imaging (the seniors on this rotation this week describe it as "extra vacation time")
* 4 weeks of internal medicine (intense and difficult, but great clinicians to work with)
* 2 weeks of neurology (also difficult, but important to know)
* 2 weeks of oncology (no idea how this rotation is)
* 2 weeks of ophthalmology (good thing, since we haven't really had any in the curriculum so far)
* 2 weeks of "postmortem diagnosis" (aka necropsy) (not looking forward to this)
* 2 weeks of orthopedic surgery
* 2 weeks of soft tissue surgery
* 2 weeks of after hours urgent care (like 5-11 pm scheduled, then on call from 11 pm to 8 am)
* 4 weeks of elective (which is 2 different 2-week-long electives)
* 8 weeks of VACATION! (some combination of traveling to externships, doing local externships, studying for boards, and, oh yeah, actual vacationing)

On the one hand it's nice that I'm not required to do any large animal rotations as a small animal tracker (although I think maybe one of my electives has to be in equine or food animal). On the other hand, it might be nice to get a little more experience in those areas before taking boards. However, as the senior practicum coordinator pointed out, seniors take boards in November, and there's a very good chance that I would get any selected large animal rotations after I've already taken the boards, so that they wouldn't be beneficial for studying anyway. Or at least that's the rationalization I'm using to justify avoiding large animals at all costs...

The large animal track has some of the same core rotations: 3 weeks of anesthesia, 3 weeks of diagnostic imaging, 2 weeks of postmortem diagnosis, 2 weeks of after hours urgent care. Large animal trackers only take 2 weeks of small animal internal medicine, and the rest of their core is made up of equine field service, equine medicine, equine lameness/surgery, food animal field service, food animal medicine, large animal emergency medicine, and a large animal externship.

General track has the basics from small animal (except derm, cardio, ophtho, and neuro) and the basics from large animal (just fewer weeks of some of them).

A lot of people seem to be having trouble picking their tracks. There are a variety of sources you can go to for advice: other juniors, current seniors, recent graduates from our vet school or other schools, vets you know out in practice, prospective employers, and the senior practicum coordinator. Apparently people tend to get conflicting advice from just about everyone they ask, and it doesn't help at all.

I'm really interested to see what the breakdown of track selections ends up being in our class. Apparently prior to a couple years ago, they had had a pretty predictable ratio of small versus general versus large, but this year's seniors messed everything up: they had a huge number of people decide to track large or general, which I hear sort of messed up the curriculum and scheduling for their year. From an informal, unscientific poll of my classmates, I've heard very few people express a plan to track small animal -- even a lot of people that I expected to track small are telling me they've decided on general. Stay tuned since I hope they'll tell us the general breakdown of track selections at some point in the next few weeks.