Am I still a new grad?

I find it hard to believe students from the year below me at vet school received their finals results last week.

It doesn’t feel like a year since my friends and I were sailing down the Kelvin for the infamous Glasgow raft race on results day. Well, there was more falling into the river than floating done, admittedly.

In typical student fashion, the email we’d been agonising over finally arrived when we’d nipped out to Aldi for supplies – three of us desperately trying to get enough signal to download the page in the pasta aisle was not how we’d envisaged receiving some of the most important news of our careers.

One year on…

While the carefree student life does seem a long way off, it seems insane we qualified a year ago. The time has flown, and I am in no way ready to stop referring to myself as a “new grad”, despite the fact many of my uni colleagues will quite possibly finding themselves working alongside this years cohort of “newer new grads”.

My friends have all had varying experiences, with some having moved practices or preparing to move shortly. Everyone’s first year in practice has been turbulent, but having spent the first five months as a glorified TB tester, I certainly don’t feel like I have a representative year of experience to let go of the new grad title just yet.

I didn’t get off to a flying start, but what I missed out on clinically to begin with was made up for in the steep learning curve about what I certainly did not want from a job. This gave me the confidence to turn down job offers second time around until I found the right one.

Better than before

The patience certainly paid off. My current practice is a vast improvement; I’m surrounded by supportive colleagues and have learned so much in my time with them so far.

However, while I’ve learned more and my clinical skills have improved more in the past three months than during the entirety of my first role, it still doesn’t compare to where some of my friends are after a good, solid nine months or more in the same place.

This doesn’t bother me that much, because there are several contributing factors, but it did scare me a little to realise it’s 12 months since I was considered fit to practice veterinary medicine and I still feel like I’m bumbling along, muddling through each day.

One of those days

The imposter syndrome lessens with time, but you feel like you’re just about getting the hang of things – you have a few good surgeries, a few cases that respond as expected to treatment and, BANG, you have a day where nothing goes according to plan – a day when:

• every vaccination appointment has something else wrong
• the spay is the spay from hell
• every blood sample is a crazy cat intent on savaging everyone
• every glucose curve does not remotely resemble a curve
• every test result is inconclusive or otherwise unhelpful

I think this is nature’s way of keeping you grounded though, and it happens to everyone, but as (maybe not-so) new grads, we tend to blame ourselves when days like that happen rather than just accept them as part of life.

So am I still a new grad? I think so – and I’ll probably still think that for a long time, but I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m no longer the youngest vet in the practice.