Hi, my name's Elisa. I'm studying vet science in my final year. I love working
with people, and I love working with animals, and it put those two together
for me. I love the challenge of coming every day and seeing something new, and
being hands-on with something new every day is really exciting. UQ is definitely
a world-renowned University, especially for vet science, and as far as my options
for studying vet science in Australia, UQ was nice and close to home and a
really well respected degree. So I was lucky enough to get in and that was
where I ended up. When I first started studying at UQ I was pretty scared, but also
really excited. I just came from Brisbane, so not far away at all. I remember
getting here my first day and meeting so many people, all interested in the same
sorts of things as I was. We have plenty of facilities all geared towards animals
so it's not just about lecture theatres when you're out here, we have places like
in here - The Hub - where we can get hands-on with all the different skills
that we need to practice. We've got heaps of animal handling
facilities and places we can go to be hands-on with animals as well. We have a
lot of really high-tech facilities like our vet clinical center here on
campus. Where students can be hands-on with real client's animals and learn to
be a real vet. Which is really exciting. So I guess when we start in first year
there's a lot of time in labs and looking at things under microscopes and
things like that, and as we progress through the degree we get more and more
hands-on with animals and treating sick animals as well. There's not really a
typical day for me as a vet student. Every day is different, which I think is
what keeps things really exciting. But we do plenty of lectures, plenty of hands-on
practical work, tutorials and lots of things after-hours for Gatton campus
students to be involved in. Social events and different special interest group
meetings. The biggest challenge for me when I started was really learning how
to learn. Learning how to commit knowledge to memory and keeping it for each
subsequent year. Because you're always building on the knowledge that you had
from first year. I think that was the biggest challenge, as I moved through the
degree, was making sure I could learn effectively and retain that information.
One of my absolute favorite things I've got to do is treat a cow that had a
fracture through the bottom of its jaw, and we treated it by putting, kind of like,
braces on its teeth to stabilise that fracture. I got to do that and it was
successful and that was probably one of the most rewarding days I've had.
We do heaps of placement in our program. So the first three years of our degree
are really geared towards what we call 'pre-clinical placement', which is all
on-farm. So on a cattle farm, on a horse
property, sheep properties. Really learning how those businesses run and
and work as a business, because if you're going to give advice to farmers you need
to understand that. In the last two years we do a lot of time in vet clinics,
hands-on with patients, really trying to figure out what's going on with them
while being supervised by a qualified vet. And gearing our skills towards being
a real vet, so that's what I've been doing the past couple years.
I was pretty surprised by the community that I met when I came out here at
Gatton. I didn't really anticipate to make the number of friends that I did.
The number of lifelong friends that I did. I kind of expected you'd need to be
like: 'You show up and do your classes and you go home and go to sleep'. But it's not
like that at all. It's about the social life and being part of that
community as well, which I didn't expect at all. I'm involved in a lot of the
social aspect of living at Gatton. I've lived in the Halls of Residence my whole
time here, that's our college here at Gatton. I've met a lot of my friends
through there, because you live right next door to them, so pretty easy to make
friends like that. But I've also made a lot of friends playing sports and even
going to, what we call, Special Interest Groups, where you get a group of people
together who are interested in the same type of vet science. We can sit and talk
about different cases and things that we're interested in. Studying at Gatton was
one of the best things I probably did for myself and for my studies. Coming out
to such a small community, and when I was 17 and I moved out here, I was quite a
shy person. Very introverted. But the community campus was so small,
and so tight-knit, everyone was so welcoming. That was hugely important
for me in coming out of my shell, and improving myself and my studies. We have
extremely supportive staff and support services all across the campus, in all
our different Faculties. So they really make sure that we are comfortable
in our studies and progressing well.
Some of the non-academic facilities we have
at campus include our gym and swimming pool, which is all brand newly
refurbished. So beautiful spaces to do our exercise. We have all our Halls of Residence
which have common rooms and different areas where people can get
together and hang out, socialise. I wish that sixteen-year-old me knew
that coming into vet science was not going to be easy. It is academically
taxing. I think as a vet we attract a lot of perfectionists.
You want achieve highly and you don't always get things perfect, and you make
mistakes. And I kind of wish I knew that before I had to go on that learning
curve and fail sometimes, and have to pick yourself back up and try again.
Short term, I definitely want to look to work as a GP vet, just in a mixed
practice and pick up some of those skills that you need to start to learn
once you've graduated vet science. Long term, I'm definitely interested in
working for the government maybe looking at food quality or export quality.
I think a lot of people think that a vet degree means go and work in a small
practice and spay dogs and cats all day, but it's really a lot more open doors
than that I guess. So you can go and work with a whole bunch of
different species, you can work with alpacas if you want to, you can go and
work in a pharmaceutical industry and develop new drugs that can make a
difference for a lot of different animals. You can work for the government,
you can be a researcher, you could go and specialise if you're really interested
in something in particular. There's just so many different things,
different pathways you could go down with a vet degree.