When you start at 18, your eyes are focused on, I'm going to be a vet in
practice. Studying at Cambridge Vet school does open your eyes to the world
of possibilities with veterinary medicine. It's not just a case of study
vet medicine, go and work in general practice for the rest of your life. You
never know where the vet career is going to go and it's an incredible thing that
it can almost go anywhere. Whether that's the European specialism,
research, teaching or government work. The size of the vet school is the important
thing. It is the smallest of the vet schools, but we see
that very much as a positive. Out of all the universities we've got the smallest
class sizes, about 60 a year. It means that we get the opportunity to spend
more time with the students on a one-to-one basis. That goes for the first
three years, where you've got the supervision system, so once a week you're
literally spending an hour with somebody from your three main subjects and you're
talking it through. You've got the ability to ask questions, we have the
ability to question you. You find in the final year, the groups are three,
there's three students, so you're not treated as students at that point,
you're about to become professional. You are treated as professional, as you're
part of the decision making team. You have one-to-one case control, which
is actually quite unique, I think, compared to everywhere else. We have the best of both
worlds. On the one hand, we're at the epicenter of a huge research environment,
so we have the benefits that that brings in terms of
being at the cutting edge of research advances. But we also have a wonderful
referral hospital on site which gives our students the chance to get lots of
clinical experience in very small groups. We don't want to trade off of a name, I
don't think any of us want to trade off just the Cambridge name. What we want to
do is be justifiably up there as one of the great science universities in the
world. For the last five years, we've had the clinical skill centre and which is
now set up and is a foundation of our training. There's a chance to go
and practice all those skills before you go and see a live animal. There's various
equipment around that allows us to practice putting in cannulas, to
potentially give animals fluid and there's some wonderful equipment here
where we can actually control what they see on the screen for the unaesthetic as
if there was a real patient there. What that allows us to do, is obviously give
them a relatively normal set of circumstances and then slowly ease them
into something maybe more dramatic happening. You'll see an array of animals
at the vet school, which is incredible. In my final year I've been involved
in treating of a cheetah from a local wildlife sanctuary, I've been involved
with people's pet pigs, thoroughbred horses that have won races, people's prized
pets, down to rats, hamsters and guinea pigs. There's such a
wide array of animals that you'll be involved in treating and you never quite
know what's going to come through the door. These are some of the horses that
we use for teaching and specifically I use these horses to teach cardiology.
We have two other buildings as part of the hospital, one which is our diagnostic
unit, where our inpatients stay and we have an intensive care unit at
the back of that building and our other building is a surgical building where
we've got two surgical suites. What we're really looking for at an interview, is a
real passion for the subject and an ability to problem-solve and have a go
at problems even if it's an unfamiliar topic or an unfamiliar area.
I think it's really important to have a really inquisitive mind always be asking
questions that's the way that we're always learning and developing within
within the career. We're not so interested in acquisition of specific
knowledge at that point, but really an ability to problem-solve and have a go.
I think the other thing that's really quite important to us, is a science-based
degree here it's a very heavily science-based degree and we want people
that are passionate about that science, the underlying principles behind it.
I got to the end of my first year and I'd failed a couple of my exams. Actually I
feel now five years on I'm a stronger person for having gone through that, than
if I have found vet school a walk in the park. Because actually there are going to
be challenges through my career, there's going to be difficult cases, there's
going to be things that you're not going to be able to do. That's okay, you can
get over those and you can still build and improve. Whether you think it or not,
you are Cambridge material because you're the brightest of your class if
you're applying for veterinary medicine. You know, you're up there. In my mind, I wasn't
Cambridge material I was never going to get in. I only applied because my parents
said, well what's the harm and sending off an application and yet I'm here
three months, hopefully, from graduating as a qualified vet