Question: 1. How did you come to the realisation that being a vet was not a job that would suit you personally and why?

Lucy McGowan answered on 18 May 2020: last edited 18 May 2020 11:38 pm

Hi Thalia and Theo! This is a great question. I actually didn’t realise I didn’t want to be a vet until after I got rejected from vet school. Now that sounds like a rejected person trying to reclaim ownership of the rejection and walk away saying “I didn’t want to come to your vet school anyway!”. Stick with me – it wasn’t.
That rejection was tough for me; I was only 17, I had studied very hard for my A levels and did literally thousands of hours of relevant work experience. I did work experience with 4 different vets, worked at farms, at a zoos and delivered baby lambs. I’d wanted to be a vet since I could remember and I really tried my hardest.
I decided to take a year out to work before university and decide whether to reapply for veterinary medicine. After a few months of thinking I realised that the pressure I was putting on myself to “be a vet” was enormous and I wasn’t enjoying the idea of it so much anymore. Did I really want to be a vet? Had I just not considered other options? Were there even other options for me? YES! There were. However, I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I had to train to be a specific thing, like a teacher, a doctor, a hairdresser, A VET. Nobody ever told me I could just go to university, study a subject I loved (Biology for me) and figure out the job part later.
I went to uni and I studied lots of different topics and got to understand more about what areas of biology I found the most exciting. I got much more interested in research, diseases and the immune system. I thought it was so cool and I started to believe I could be a scientist. I only started to work towards that goal when I was about 21 and half way through uni! As part of my job now, I have had to do some training with a vet and learn about lots of drugs and anatomy and monitoring health for animals in research. This training was a tiny insight into what being at vet school would have been like. I found it nowhere near as interesting as I found my degree and current day-to-day job. That’s when it really hit me that vet school wouldn’t have been for me at all!
Someone once told me “You can’t be what you can’t see!”. When I was at school and I wanted to be a vet, I’d never met a scientist, I’d never spoken to a scientist and I certainly didn’t think someone like me could be a scientist. That’s why I love doing things like “I’m a Scientist…” and talking to young people who might not know that it’s an option and a really exciting one at that!