Lesson 25: The Veterinary School Application Process
Congratulations. You’ve decided to embark on probably one of the most expensive, time-consuming journeys of your life. The GRE, the personal statement, supporting materials, the supplemental essays, and the interview add together to what can often be a headache. Despite this, over 2,000 people enroll in Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) programs every year. This guide offers resources and approaches to help you maximize your chances that you’re one of the 2,000.
This guide helps you conceptualize the overall application while helping you consider how each detail of the overall application contributes to this conception. To grasp the application in all its complexity, we encourage you to think about the application as a whole. While this guide will focus on each application component, it will also push you to think about how these components work together. No part of the application acts independently, and each component builds upon the previous.
An admissions officer will read each section in relation to the others with two questions in mind. First, is this person qualified? And second, does this person truly want to become a veterinarian? Everything you write should be in the service of assuring the reader these things. In the process of writing, you may encounter self-doubt and insecurity. As with any life-altering decision, these misgivings are healthy and normal, so long as your enthusiasm outweighs your doubts most of the time.
In order to focus on the details, however, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what the application looks like and how you can craft your application that answers the major questions guiding your evaluation.
The application is lengthy and shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s for people who truly want to be vets, who have thought about this for years, who have made sure to seek experiences that confirm their desires. This guide will complement the long, hard work of deciding to become a veterinarian. It will not replace the hours of contemplation and experiences you should undertake before considering applying. You must have already completed the required coursework in undergraduate and have completed shadowing experiences within veterinary offices. Many students have between 500 and 1,000 hours of shadowing experience before applying. However, these hours must also pair with a compelling narrative that ties these interests and experiences together.
The VMCAS
The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges administers the Veterinary Medical College Application Service (VCMAS). Similar to the Common Application, the VCMAS allows you to apply to multiple programs with a single application. This centralized application consists of:
Personal Information/Academic History: This section contains the academic information (GRE scores, transcripts, demographic information) that you don’t have flexibility in crafting. This guide doesn’t cover this component of the application.
Supporting Information: This is the area you have the most flexibility in crafting. This section contains your letters of recommendation (or references), observation hours verification, experiences, achievements, and essays.
Supplemental information: Some schools have additional requirements, like shorter essays and additional fees.
Upon application review, schools will begin requesting interviews around December, where you’ll fly out (or, perhaps even post-COVID, Zoom into) to a school. If you’re personable and score high marks on your multiple mini interviews (MMI), you’ll then be accepted to the school.
This form of the application is similar to that of undergraduate admissions. The application differs, however, in what admissions officers seek. Because an undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for DVM programs, people often think of the application in terms of the applications you wrote five or more years ago. Because of the large number of high schoolers applying to four-year colleges and universities, a huge industry has emerged around this process. From the large admissions offices to the test-prep and admissions consulting programs, the audiences of these applications are a tad different from that of veterinary school applications.
Undergraduate admissions offices are large, complex operations. From marketing schools to providing tours to organizing daily info sessions, the undergraduate admissions office can be likened to an industrial operation. In any successful industrial operation, individuals from all knowledge bases and disciplines come together to provide valuable input on the process to sell more applications. (Admissions offices then make more money on application fees while simultaneously making the school appear more competitive and ultimately increasing its rankings.)
Despite declining enrollment in the humanistic disciplines, undergraduate admissions committees are often disproportionately comprised of members from the humanities. Essays must be perfect—no comma splices, misspelled words, or banal metaphors. Given the immense competition, small errors are great reasons for undergraduate admissions counselors to disqualify you from the process. In undergraduate admissions, while content is important, form is too.
In contrast, the physical therapy school admissions office is staffed mostly by practicing veterinarians and DVM students. The people whose main day-to-day writing activities include making notes on animal behavior and scrawling pain medications using pre-formulated medical shorthand are the same people reading your application. While many of these people come from undergraduate majors as varied as art history or anthropology, most are far removed from those days.
Consequently, the essays' form will not be scrutinized like undergraduate admissions essays. The ambitious creative risks employed by overachieving prospective undergraduates—the essay about napkins in haiku form, the rap about the 1054 supernova observed by Chinese astronomers—are not going to necessarily shift the needle in the way they would for an undergraduate application.
Rather, vivid descriptions that highlight your motivations to become a veterinarian will have the most impact on the essays' effectiveness. Concise, cogent writing is key. What are the experiences that made you want to become a vet? How did those experiences do that? Even the most boring experience can be the grounds for a good story, when told right.
This guide predominantly covers parts of the application where you have significant agency to craft during the application process. For other parts of the VMCAS Application, like standardized testing and interview prep, see the resources below.
GRE Prep
https://www.kaptest.com/study/gre/
https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/
Interview Prep
https://www.sgu.edu/blog/veterinary/vet-school-interview-questions-to-expect/
https://louisville.edu/pre-vet/veterinary-school-admissions/interview-preparation
