Lesson 26: The Veterinary Essays and Other Resources
The Essays are the main opportunity to tie activities and experiences together as a means of truly connecting with the people who read your application. Ultimately, you want to write an essay that makes the reader want to become your future professor or colleague. The VMCAS application requires three 2,000-character, or about 350-word essays. While this length can sometimes seem long, it’s a limited amount of space to convince the admissions committee that you’re someone they want to have as future colleagues or students.
For the 2020 application cycle (and future application cycles), the essay prompts are:
There are many career choices within the veterinary profession. What are your future career goals and why? (2,000 character limit)
In what ways do veterinarians contribute to society and what do you hope to contribute? (2,000 character limit)
Consider the breadth of society which veterinarians serve. What attributes do you believe are essential to be successful within the veterinary profession? Of these attributes, which do you possess and how have you demonstrated these in the past? (2,000 character limit)
While these prompts at first glance seem like they invite you to talk in broad strokes about the veterinary profession and your intended goals within that framework.
However, admissions officers don’t want to know about how you intend to, broadly speaking, improve the conditions for non-human animals. Admissions officers want to know about the abused dog who entered the vet’s office with patches of hair missing and an inability to fully stand up. They want to hear about how, with proper rehabilitation and veterinary care, the dog became a skittish, pathetic mess to a perfectly suitable family dog. They want to hear about how you, as someone shadowing the vet, helped hold the paw of that dog as he underwent inoculation. They want to hear about how the most difficult dilemmas or jubilant celebrations inform your desire to be a vet. They don’t want to hear how you hope that the veterinary profession abstractly makes the world a better place.
These essays are also not the space to rehash from the activities and experiences sections the core responsibilities you had shadowing in a veterinary hospital. This is the time to discuss your experiences with the cat, unable to stand up from her back spasms, whose owner’s anxieties were eased by your calm touch. It’s the time to discuss why your own dog’s injury that left doctors saying “he’ll never play fetch again” reinforced your confidence in veterinary medicine, allowing Spot to, in fact, play fetch again.
In general, you’re going to want to tell your reader why it’s inevitable that veterinary school is the next step in your journey. However, you don’t tell the reader this by saying, “A veterinary program is the inevitable next step in my journey.”
You show it by explaining to the reader the things you’ve done that have gotten you to the point where you’ve concluded, Hm, I think I’m ready to spend half a decade of my life and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a career making animals’ lives better, or at least less bad.
This usually means recounting an event or a set of events that created a turning point in how you view the world and want to contribute to it. A good story comes from the deep, dark crevices of that turning point. You may not even consciously know that turning point exists, so think deeply.
Why did you decide to volunteer at the horse veterinarian’s office? What was it about the puppy with seizures that impassioned you so much?
The easiest way to write a compelling story is to write from a specific event. A specific example is compelling not for the content itself, but for the specificity that drives the narrative forward.
Writing a good story means starting with a vision in your head and translating that vision to the written word. However, language is an imperfect medium to express those intangible images—sometimes lingering, sometimes fleeting—that sit in your mind. Language will never truly crystallize the vision you have up there, but you must start with that vision if you’re ever going to get anything close.
The Definitive Medical School Applications Guide expands upon this attitude towards writing. For more advice on crafting a compelling application, consider reading the following sections:
4. “I’m not convinced he wants to be a doctor”: What Not to Write About and How Not to Write it
5. How to Write your Essay: Two Approaches
6. Cleaning Up the Mess
8. Activities, Activities, Activities
While these sections describe the Medical School Application, their implications reach far beyond this application. Figuring out a writing method that works well for you and determining how to group, describe, and order your experiences apply equally to the VMCAS application.
