The nature of the vet course is inherently competitive, with the odds stacked against you from the very beginning.
During our A-levels we are told that only 1 out of every 5 to 10 applicants make it to vet school, and that you’re lucky to get a single interview or offer (any more than that is just greedy).
In university, when students on other courses are totalling up their grades to calculate if they are getting 1sts or 2:1s, vets are given a pass mark of 50%, which has the paradoxical effect of making it seem like you should be sailing through the course when, in actual fact, the bar is set so low because – yes – it really is that hard.
Negative feelings
The majority of vets and vet students, I am sure, can report to experiencing some form of impostor syndrome at some point in their careers – if not throughout.
Impostor syndrome is the feeling you are not as bright, or competent, or worthy of where you are in life as everyone around you thinks you are. It can be a toxic, self-deprecating and sometimes debilitating sensation, making you feel entirely alone when really everyone around you is most likely in exactly the same boat.
No motivation
From a little of my own experience, and through speaking to others in the field, I know this feeling has only grown stronger among my peers as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
After almost a year of online learning, open book exams and, in some cases, a complete lack of the hands-on practice and subsequent reassurance we should all be receiving right now, it’s only natural things don’t feel quite right.
Being cooped up all day, and going long periods of time without seeing friends and loved ones, certainly doesn’t inspire productivity, and it can be hard to stay motivated with nothing to look forward to on the horizon – whether that’s a long holiday in the sun or just a nice catch-up with your mates down the pub at the end of the week.
Under pressure
After a year of lockdowns with nothing else to do, I think it’s all too easy to put too much pressure on yourself to accomplish everything because, look, you’ve never had this much free time before!
I’ve heard from lots of students who think – especially due to last year’s open book exams – that they “don’t deserve to be here“; that they haven’t worked as hard as they could have, or should have; that they’ve dropped the standard, so to speak.
But that’s the thing, even if it doesn’t feel like you’re working as hard as your old self used to in “the before world of February 2020 and earlier”, that’s because this is a completely different kind of work.
Marathon effort
It’s so much easier to sit down and do a day’s work with no distractions when the rest of your life is stable, but when it’s not, even the little things can become difficult – and that’s okay.
Take marathon runners, for example: capable of running for miles and miles, so of course, that first mile, or even the first 10, probably feel like nothing (as a max 10km runner I wouldn’t know personally, but I can assume).
That 25th mile, though – when they’ve already come so far, they’re worn out and their energy reserves are entirely depleted – is probably the hardest one of all. It’s likely a challenge to just put one foot in front of the other. It’s going to feel like they’re working 1,000 times harder than they had to for that first mile, even though the distance hasn’t changed – the conditions have.
Third and final (?) leg
As the third lockdown trickled ever so slowly onwards, I think everyone felt like they were just trying to keep up on what they hope is going to be the last leg of this unprecedented journey.
For marathon runners at least, they know how long that run is going to be, so they can go all out on that final sprint. In lockdown terms, though, we don’t really know when this race is going to be over (despite the Government’s road map out of lockdown) – and that makes it okay to not feel like you have to give it your all every single day, but leave some in the tank so you can keep going the next day and the next.
No shame
What I’m trying to say (through some very dodgy metaphors) is that we’ve all come so far, and there is no shame in taking extra days off, or extra rest breaks; that if you passed an exam or a year at vet school – open books or not – you deserved that pass.
It was probably one of the hardest exams you ever had to take, at the dawn of a global pandemic when no one knew up from down or left from right.
We all need to be proud of ourselves for whatever we’ve achieved over the past 12 months, even if that’s just making it through and being there for each other.
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