For years before I became a vet student, I received the same, often unsolicited advice that I should not have a job during vet school. I even had two different employers tell me that, while they were happy to keep me on, it would be better for me if I only worked during the breaks. Many of my classmates followed this advice and focused only on school. I, being a particularly stubborn person, elected to work two part-time jobs for my first year, which was a… poor choice. Most veterinary students should work at least a little during the school year, but the job needs a purpose and some flexibility, and you need to be willing to cut back quickly. Work can sharpen clinical judgment, ease money pressure, and keep you connected to the profession by reminding you why you are here. It can also wreck your semester if hours, role, or timing are wrong. If you are in vet school, instead of asking, “should I work?” ask yourself, “what kind of work, how much, and when?”
The default advice of “don’t work” is not unfounded. Vet school is a heavy load and can feel very overwhelming at times. In undergrad, students work with an advisor to choose a schedule that works for them. Some classes only have specific times, but usually students can move their classes so that they can have a consistent work schedule. By contrast, vet school schedules your classes for you and constantly moves those classes around depending on instructor availability, lab times, and events hosted by the college. This requires your schedule to be very flexible, as the college will not be. The class load truly feels an order of magnitude higher than in undergrad. Not only are you probably taking more classes than you ever have before, but most of them are very dense science classes.
When exam season really gets started, your school performance becomes crucial. Failing an exam is, usually, recoverable, but failing multiple exams, even if they are in different classes, will snowball on you fast. From my own experience, I was up very late the night before an exam due to an extremely complex case coming in, and it had a huge effect on how I felt coming into the exam. In vet school, there are a bunch of organizations that you will greatly benefit from being a part of, and those can take up a significant proportion of the time you have left to work a job. Being involved in these organizations can teach you new skills, introduce you to new fields, and help train your leadership skills so that you are a competent veterinarian later. Not to mention, at some point you are supposed to eat, sleep, exercise, and have a social life. The default advice is trying to protect your GPA and your sleep but does not give the full picture. While these organizations are amazing to be a part of, they cannot perfectly simulate what you would be doing in a clinic. If you are not regularly practicing the skills you developed to get into vet school, they will begin to atrophy over time. Finally, while vet school is hard, so is being a veterinarian! Building your stamina and work-capacity will benefit you once you graduate and need to be able to stay sharp all day.
The benefits of working in vet school outweigh the costs for most people. There are skills you gain in a clinic that school cannot give you. Oklahoma State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine puts a large emphasis on teaching clinical skills, clinical reasoning, and client communication. The labs are very helpful for teaching or seeing where you are in those skills, but the only way you can improve is by continuous practice, and school cannot give you enough reps. If the only experience you have during your pre-clinical years is what you get in those labs, then clinicals are going to be incredibly difficult. Someone who works part-time as a veterinary assistant continues practicing these skills for years and can apply what they have learned in school to communicate with clients better, hear heart murmurs better, and practice their differential diagnoses.
During your first year of vet school, you are going to touch very few living animals. Most of your time is spent in lectures and working with cadavers or models until you are competent enough to work on living animals. While models and cadavers are great for teaching you locations and techniques, they are no replacement for practice on live animals. Sometimes, what you are learning feels like it just doesn’t matter. If you don’t get to see the clinical relevance, it can start to feel like very difficult busy work. Working in the veterinary industry can help you find a mentor, which becomes increasingly important the further into vet school you go. Eventually, you are going to want someone who can guide you through practical application of the skills you are learning, and the best way to learn that is live in the field, under the direction of an experienced doctor. Recently, the laws regarding federal student loans have changed, meaning that veterinary students cannot borrow as much as they could in the past.
Additionally, interest rates have been climbing and may continue to do so for quite some time, meaning that student loans cost more to take out and they cover less than before. Working to pay more of your living expenses and take out less debt is certainly a smart idea. Having some cash available to travel to externships, sign up for wet labs, or even to travel to your family without having to borrow it is also a pretty good reason to put in some hours at your clinic or laboratory. Finally, I think it is a great way to experiment with your career. Maybe you think you want to work in emergency medicine but have little experience in that field. Working a few shifts a month at your local emergency hospital would be a great way to find out if that atmosphere suits you. If the doctors seem to be burnt out and exhausted all the time, that would be a great thing for you to learn before deciding if you want to go into that field of medicine. I have learned a lot of skills, found a mentor, and made connections with my professors all through working a few different part-time jobs while in vet school, and it has been an overall net benefit for me.
While working in vet school has its benefits, it must land in its proper place on your priority list. Work experience is less important to getting hired as a veterinarian than passing your classes and must come second to school for you to be successful here. You are not a robot and therefore need to establish a cap to your weekly hours and some “abort mission” parameters. For a job in vet school to be worth it, it needs to serve the function of making you a better veterinarian. I would not work at a coffee shop or the library, for example. They may be very flexible with their hours but do little to make you a better doctor. If a job allows you to study on the clock, it may be worth it, but I still would not risk working a job that does not allow you to practice your veterinary skills.
I would only consider jobs in veterinary clinical settings or in research, depending on your goals. Once you find a job that you think is a good fit, you need to have a discussion during your interview about capping your hours and see if there is any flexibility during the busier parts of the semester. However many hours you think you can reliably work, I would cut that number in half. I would also build non-negotiable study time and downtime into your schedule but understand that you will have to have less of both. As the semester goes on, continue to adjust your work schedule so it works best for you. In my first semester, this is where I failed. I worked 15-20 hours every weekend. It was way too much, and though I passed all of my classes, it was completely unsustainable.
I could have had a much stronger and more enjoyable semester if I had backed off when I first realized it was going to be too much. It is also important to remember that when you work is just as important as how much you work, if not more so. A four-hour shift on a Saturday afternoon feels a lot different than a shift from 10pm-2am the night before an early exam. This sounds like common sense, but it can be hard to think about your schedule in that much detail weeks in advance. Try hard to maintain your relationships. As much as we hate to admit it, we are social creatures and require collaboration to succeed. This is especially true in veterinary medicine where we require training to learn new procedures and second opinions are often required for an accurate diagnosis.
Vet school is as much of a networking opportunity as it is an educational one and will give you the opportunity to meet some of the best of the best in their field. When deciding how much to work, do not compare yourself to others. Some people are getting help from their parents and don’t need to make any kind of income, while others need to work to feed their own children. Someone being forced to have an unsustainable work schedule is not necessarily a superior work ethic but could be out of necessity for their situation. As you go through the semester, you need to draw some red lines where, if you cross them, you must significantly decrease hours worked, if not quit the job entirely. One of those lines must be a grade threshold, where if you drop below that in a class you make a large adjustment to your work schedule, at least for a while. This is individual, but I would try to draw that line to give yourself a buffer, where you adjust before you drop to a failing grade, not after. There is also a mental health aspect that you should consider. For me, my grades never fell below the threshold I set, but I was completely exhausted every single day, for an amount of money and experience that was not worth it. While pushing yourself hard in vet school builds toughness, I think too much can teach you that anything less than complete exhaustion is laziness.
If you have found a job with a flexible schedule that fulfills the purpose of providing you with valuable clinical or other veterinary experience, you can probably make this work. For one, it bears repeating that you should work less than you think you can. Take any extracurriculars into account if that extracurricular is more valuable to you than a job would be. I am in several clubs and in my second year, which means that I cannot sustain working much more than seven hours a week when averaged over the month. If you can find a job as a student representative for your school, while it may not provide clinical experience during the semester, the pay is usually quite generous, and it can open you up to summer externships or jobs. These types of jobs usually allow you to do most of the work remotely, on your own schedule. Most work that is not remote is usually marketing and events on campus, such as career fairs, lunch and learns, etc.
If a company that you are interested in is hiring a student representative at your school, it is certainly worth applying to! My school also hires veterinary students to work as tutors for the classes below them, meaning that your work is on the campus that you spend most of your time, and it is also spent teaching material. This is very valuable to you, as teaching material is the best way to learn it. The bottom line is, if you are going to work a job, you have to make the job work for you, and you are allowed to choose a hob that fits school.
Veterinary school is a real challenge and can make it hard to justify to yourself doing anything else with your time. Working through school can give you more clinical experience, remind you why you wanted this, and give you a bit of extra income to help pay for life and school expenses. I suggest you try to work a little, but you have to be careful. Remember that school is the priority, not the job. I am confident that most students can work in school if they are honest with themselves and remember that the job must have a purpose.