My interview at the University of Bristol was as terrifying as all my others, although it was my last chance.
The interview at Edinburgh hadn’t gone well; I had been sent to the wrong room in the library and subsequently forgotten about, then hastily hurried in during lunch, with grumpy interviewers and a flustered interviewee.
At Cambridge, the first thing I noticed as I sat down were the three B-grades I got at GCSE highlighted on my CV in front of the interviewer (German, history and physics, for those interested), which rather put me off my stride.
I never even got interviews at Glasgow or Liverpool (the rumour was people who didn’t go the Glasgow open day didn’t get interviews, and I didn’t have enough work experience for Liverpool, despite my best efforts). I didn’t fancy living in London, so hadn’t applied, which left Bristol, as I said, as my last chance to live out my James Herriot dreams.
Video nasty
In preparation, my mum had videoed me during a mock interview, using our extremely newfangled, high-tech video camera. She showed me a video of a hunched, mumbling idiot who I was horrified to discover was me.
The “idiot” part of the problem was hard to solve in such a short space of time, but when I sat down in the interview chair at Southwell Street in Bristol, I did my very best to enunciate and sit up straight.
I must have got something right in my mumblings about how best to solve the problem of bTB (a problem that has, thankfully, been fully sorted out, as you would expect after a quarter of a century) and attempts to make me sound interesting, because a few weeks later an offer of a place on the veterinary science course landed on the doormat.
Interview amnesia
I don’t remember much about the interview apart from the vague details above, but I do remember I was never asked if I could cope with the difficulties the job would throw at me. In fact, the subject didn’t come up at all.
If you work in the profession it probably hasn’t escaped your notice there seems to be a problem getting hold of vets. There are more universities, and the number of students in each year is bigger than ever (anecdotally, I haven’t studied this in detail, but as a ballpark figure, there were about 70 people in my year; I don’t think you get fewer than 100 nowadays), but it seems to be very hard to actually find any of the buggers to recruit – depending on the type of job you’re offering, of course.
If we’re training more vets, but there still don’t seem to be any, then they must be falling out of the profession somehow.
The problem as ‘they’ see it
I see a lot of comments about this retention crisis in letters to the veterinary papers and journals, in posts online and in the comments underneath them, and one opinion always seems to poke above the parapet.
I’m sure you’ve seen it, or even posted it yourself. It goes along these lines: “The problem is universities recruit students for the courses based on their academic abilities and not for their ability to cope with practice. Different questions need to be asked at the interview stage.”
Here are my thoughts: I disagree. Strongly.
There’s something I find quite distasteful and actually insulting in the argument above. Implicit in this argument – generally from old vets like me with many years under their belts – is the idea that the current crop of vet students are unworldly bookworms, shrinking violets who can’t deal with the real world or proper hard work, and quit the profession at the their first taste of the sharp end of general practice.
Given many of the posts I’ve seen about this are from male vets, and the majority of students nowadays are female, I can’t help but feel there’s a nasty element of sexism in it too.
I may be being unfair, or reading too much into these statements, but (not to put too fine a point on it) they piss me off and they’re bollocks.
Me, myself and I
If I, as a shy, nervous and relatively naive teenager, had been quizzed or assessed for my competency to survive the rigours of practice, I’m certain I would have failed dismally.
I certainly did not appear as someone who would cope well with the emotional stresses and long hours that practice places on you. Nevertheless, survive it I did, and I was actually pretty bloody good at it. I was empathetic with clients, caring with the animals, good in a crisis, and made relatively few mistakes.
Although it upsets my humility to blow my own trumpet, if I, years later, when I was in charge of hiring new vets at my practice, had hired a new graduate like me, I would have been pretty happy with my choice.
What point am I trying to make? This one: there isn’t a simple way of assessing how people will react in the job, certainly not when they’re as young as they are when they’re interviewed – and certainly not in the short space of time they’re interviewed for.
Now, I agree, there’s a lot more scope on the course to fully and better educate students on exactly how the job works and feels, but that’s very different to weeding them out at the interview stage – personally, I don’t think it’s possible.
Anti-academe
My second problem with this reasoning is it also implies all this academic book learnin’ is pointless, overcomplicating the subject with pointless physiological mumbo-jumbo.
While I agree there’s an element of this at university (which tends to focus more on the fine details of myasthenia gravis rather than how best to clean and close a dog-fight wound), let’s not pretend veterinary medicine is easy. The knowledge within the profession has expanded massively in the past 50 years, and this is detailed knowledge about complex and unpredictable biological organisms. Without at least a working knowledge of the breadth of it, you are doing your patients a great disservice in general practice.
Universities are right to target bright, academic students, because veterinary medicine is a complex subject. While I agree there’s an immense amount of social interaction, politics and diplomacy required in general practice, you also have to find some way to mesh that with knowledge of what’s best for your patient – and you can’t do that if you don’t at least understand what can possibly go wrong with them or how best to plan an approach to a complex case.
Falling behind the times
Complaining that new graduates aren’t tough enough to deal with the job is blaming a very large group of people for the failings of the profession itself. If we have a problem with retention (and I agree that we do), it’s because the job hasn’t modernised with the rest of the world – veterinary jobs are often inflexible, with long and frequently unsocial hours.
Many families have two working parents, and veterinary jobs, as they stand, are often incompatible with family life. When you can get better paid as a locum, and work hours that mean you can actually see your partner or your children once in a while, is it really a surprise people are increasingly choosing to work that way?
Practices need to be more open to part-time work, and although I appreciate this can be difficult in practices that operate their own out-of-hours service, the problems are not insurmountable with an open mind and by giving decent time off in lieu of OOH work.
The world has changed, and expectations have changed, and if practices don’t change with them, they’re going to struggle to recruit vets – and insulting veterinary students for not being tough enough is missing this point.
A candle in the dark
This is one area where I think the rapid corporatisation of veterinary practices here in the UK is actually going to help. Other businesses are long-used to the fact people don’t want to spend their whole lives at work, and, consequently, the corporates are more open to part-time work and flexible hours.
It’s still early days, but, as far as I can see, corporate practices are much more supportive of new graduates – a long way from the “deep end” many of us were dropped into, which I suspect was responsible for curtailing more than it’s fair share of veterinary careers.
I was academically-minded, naive, and not obviously tough when I went for my interview at Bristol. I wasn’t perfect, but I was a bloody good general practitioner. It’s time we stopped blaming veterinary students and put our own house in order.
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