In high school, you want to take a full range of academic courses. Absolutely take four years of English, four of math, and all the major lab sciences (biology, chemistry, physics). But also get some art and music and civics and a good dose of history; psychology is good, and Latin or a romance language doesn’t hurt.

You’re going to need a four-year bachelor’s degree while in college, and then get into veterinary college which takes I think another three years–after which some internship and licensing exams.

What you’ll get paid depends on where you practice–small-animal vets in Manhattan earn far more than a small-animal vet in Troy, Ohio–but in all cases, vets with a successful practice make good money. When you’re in college, you’ll have a career development center on campus that will be able to access projected salary and demand for vets in your state.

Now, the big hurdle is getting into veterinary school in the first place–they’re one of the hardest types of graduate school to enter. In order to give yourself the best chances, here’s your long-range plan:

1. In college, you plan to either major in (1) pre-med or biology, but use your electives to study as many non-science subjects as you can, or (2) major in anything, but take all of the science and math courses that a pre-med major would be required to take. Veterinary (and medical, and dental) colleges want students who have a solid science background, but they also want well-rounded scholars–if you just take a raft of science courses and avoid anything like literature, philosophy, or sociology, they’re likely to turn you away.

And make certain you earn as close to a perfect 4.0 GPA as possible, and in your junior year of college when you take the veterinary school entrance exams, score high on them!

2. Get as much hands-on experience with animals as you can. Volunteering with a local animal shelter is something you can do at your age–they’ll ask you to exercise the dogs and clean up a bit–but that alone will likely not be enough. Most veterinary colleges want their students to have large-animal experience as well, so at some point it helps if you work with cattle and goats–I heard of one vet-school applicant who’d gone to Africa and gotten to work with lions, and that was the deciding factor in his admission.

So when you get into college, find out if you can volunteer at a zoo, or on a farm, or an animal preserve. Or see if you can work part-time for a veterinary clinic that does large-animal care.

3. When you’re getting your hands-on experience with animals, make it a point to network with the veterinarians. Let them know that you’re very interesting in becoming a veterinarian, ask them for their advice (and listen with rapt attention even if they’re telling you nothing new). Try to maintain connections to your network of vets all through college–then when you’re ready to apply to veterinary school, they can help in two crucial ways: (a) you’ll need letters of recommendation, and the best ones come from practicing vets–in particular, ones who graduated from the place you’re applying to (b) there often will be an interview, and you can ask your veterinarian contacts what questions you’re likely to get and how to answer them well.

You should take:

Pre-AP bio

Pre-AP chem

AP bio

AP chem

If your school offers a HOSA program, get enrolled in it. It’s a lot of fun and you learn a lot from it.

Take as many of the medical courses your school offers as well. In my school district, they have a program where if we want Career and Technology classes, we go to a seperate school during the day and take some of those classes. There, we have an Intro to Vet Tech class, maybe your school has something similar.

It seems like you’re heading toward the small animal vet (domestic animals). Those usally start off at about 55, 000. Once you gain experience you can go up to the 75, 000 range. Again, it all depends on location, practice and all that.

You need to attend a 4 year college, then a college of vet medicine which is another 4 years (you must graduate with DVM) then you have to do a residency which ranges from state to state. So you’re looking at 10+ years of school and training.

You might want to start looking at volunteering at animal shelters. It looks good on your college applications and you get hands on experience in the field you want to go into.

Hope it helps! Good luck!

The next thing to do is to volunteer at clinics and other animal welfare areas. Take this seriously as vet schools weigh very heavily on your level of experience in the professional environment. Also, after volunteering for a while you might realize that this field is not really for you. There’s a lot of bad sides that may outweigh the good sides in vet medicine, especially at the consumer level. It’s important to get personal exposure to these issues to figure it all out yourself.

And remember, there is more to veterinary work than shots and pills. You will need to do surgery on these animals.

Do you have a local vet that you could job shadow for a day? I always send some of my eighth graders out on a job shadow…they come back even more excited about the job or they come back saying they could never do surgery or put animals down.

Good luck!

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Vets get paid very well depending on where they practice and if they are good…some make more then doctors.