Practice Management

It's been a long time since I updated; I haven't been very good at keeping this up. But I'll try to do better.

This past weekend was a rough one for the third years.

While it seemed like everyone else in Texas- from Dallas to Houston- was celebrating having Friday (or more) off due to snow, the third years took their lives in their hands and came to school anyway for a seminar about Practice Management. (We did get to start an hour late...)

It was good information- very good information- but with 2 8 hour days, I'm not sure how effectively we absorbed all of it. That's just a really long time to be listening to the same topic.

I enjoyed the information on how to operate a succesful practice. The things clients say they want (a coat hook in the exam room!), the amount of time a client will wait in your lobby before they give up and leave (15 minutes) and how to use financial statements to evaluate the success of your business.

I found the stuff about contract negotiation to be important, but hard to absorb. Most of what I got from that is that you should hire a lawyer to look over your employment contract before you sign it.

Lab Animal Medicine!

I'm really excited!

I finally got elected for something not-by-default! I'm VP of the Lab Animal Medicine club, which as far as I can tell means I'm in charge of lining up speakers. This seems like an excellent networking opportunity for lining up summer internships next summer!

Also, largely, I'm thrilled to actually win a position. I didn't manage to get elected for anything at the beginning of the school year (granted, those elections were in the first like, 2 weeks of school, so they were pretty meaningless. "Well, I like her shirt best, so I'll vote for her.") And I got elected to the Student Chapter of the AVMA Executive Committee as Governmental Action Committee Chair because nobody ran against me.

Lab Animal Medicine

We had the first meeting of the Lab Animal Medicine club today. And I'm very excited about the prospect of working with lab animals!

There are so many different kinds of things you could end up doing in lab animal medicine-- from governing type work (writing Good Laboratory Practices, GLPs) to taking care of animals used in reasearch to doing your own research projects. Also, it's a field that is in desperate need of new recruits (meaning that there's lots of available positions!) and it's in the top 2 most highly paid veterinary positions (starting salary is somewhere around $100,000!)

The downside? A 2-3 year residency then taking boards. (However, the residency does defer your student loans and pay enough to live on...)

So, this seems like a really great possibility! Now I just need to figure out what it takes to be competetive for lab animal medicine residencies!



Also, next weekend I'm going to an Wildlife Orphanage in San Antonio to watch a panther declaw and tour their facilities with the AAFP (American Association of Feline Practitioners). I'm pretty excited!