Glenda Pereira: 00:02
Welcome to the Maine Farmcast. This is your host, Dr. Glenda Pereira, an assistant professor at the University of Maine and the dairy specialist for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. For this episode, we have a two part series, so you’ll have to come back next week to learn about part two. I have a repeat guest, Maddy Philbrick, who is a colleague of ours but was a student here at the University of Maine and has ample knowledge.
Glenda Pereira: 00:30
And most recently, she got into vet school. So go, Maddy. Yay. We are super stoked for you. Congratulations.
Glenda Pereira: 00:41
I know it hasn’t been an easy path to get here, and we’re gonna talk about some of that today. But you’re on the road to get so you have an MS, you have a master’s degree. Your next degree will be a DVM. DVM.
Maddy Philbrick: 00:55
Yeah. It’s exciting. Collecting letters.
Glenda Pereira: 00:59
I was gonna say you’re collecting letters. You’ll be Dr. Maddy Philbrick here pretty soon. So I thought we would take some time to discuss what the veterinary application process is like, how you took the path to get where you are today since it wasn’t the conventional linear method we all think. And I know our listeners know this because we’ve talked about it before.
Glenda Pereira: 01:23
But so many of the guests we have are pre vet track, myself and Colt included. And then somewhere along the path, we say, hang on, maybe that’s not the right career path for me and veered into something else. So where I’d like to start is where do you begin in this vet school process?
Maddy Philbrick: 01:46
The vet school process is very extensive. It’s also very personal. I’ve had quite a bit of experience advising pre vet students. It was one of my many hats that I’ve worn since graduating four years ago from the undergrad program here at the university. I always intended on applying to vet school.
Maddy Philbrick: 02:06
Junior year was COVID. COVID-19 came through and kind of rocked everybody’s world. And at the time, I was just like, I’m not sure this is what I want to do anymore. I wasn’t big on the hybrid school that it looked like was gonna happen for vet school for a couple years. I was just burnt.
Maddy Philbrick: 02:24
I wanted to do something else, find something else. I wasn’t set on the pathway. Like you said, many of us, we get to the end and say, this isn’t what I want to do. Let’s do something else. And my something else has actually led back to vet school.
Maddy Philbrick: 02:38
So it is a little bit different than some other people’s processes. But the process itself is pretty straightforward. And then you have to personalize it. There’s this website, it’s called VMCAS. It’s run by the AVMA, and it is now what is the application portal for veterinary schools.
Maddy Philbrick: 02:57
What is AVMA? The AVMA is the American Medical Association of Veterinarians. They’re the governing board and the standards board for veterinary schools and then for veterinary practitioners in their day to day practice.
Glenda Pereira: 03:11
So where you take your qualifications, your exam certifications, etcetera.
Maddy Philbrick: 03:15
Yes. They’re the ones that set standards for like the NAVLEs, which is your licensing exam. As practices change and as code and standards change for veterinary medicine, they’re the ones that are helping with those processes and getting the information out to veterinarians if the laws have changed, basically.
Glenda Pereira: 03:34
And providing technical assistance, support, you know, if there’s a disease outbreak.
Maddy Philbrick: 03:38
But in that portal, it basically serves as your one stop application site, just like when you apply to college and there’s the one that services your application and then sends them out. It opens in January every year. There’s four quadrants to the application. So you can start the first three starting in January.
Maddy Philbrick: 03:57
The last one, which is the school specific one, opens in May. And then as soon as you’re done with that fourth one, you’re able to start submitting applications with a deadline then of September to have everything in and submitted. But if you submit sooner, you could also potentially hear from vet schools sooner depending on where you’re applying and what their admissions process is. The first quadrants, ones like background. So it’s your basic history, your state history, your family history, those types of things.
Maddy Philbrick: 04:26
Another is your education. So that’s where you’re uploading. You have to manually enter your transcripts, or you can pay an additional fee. I typed in all of my classes and manually assigned them. But you can also save yourself some time and pay the fee.
Maddy Philbrick: 04:40
Another one is your experiences. So people don’t realize, I don’t think, that the transcript and the experiences can actually take a lot of time to fill out. If you have a lot of experiences, especially where I have been out of school for four years, I have to have basically everything I’ve done since high school and anything that was relevant in high school as well. So we’re talking going back ten years, easily. That takes some time to fill out.
Maddy Philbrick: 05:08
So giving yourself the time to do that, which is why those first five months are great to work on that part of the portal. Yep. From January to May. To May. Yeah.
Maddy Philbrick: 05:18
So with the undergrads I’ve worked with, some of them wait longer to start their applications. And then it becomes this like unsurmountable task because you have all those quadrants plus the school specifics that come up in May. And it’s a lot. It’s a lot of time to devote to it. So giving yourself some grace and like, you can log on for half an hour and put in some more information just to make sure that you fully put yourself as an applicant.
Maddy Philbrick: 05:45
You wanna put your full, full self on the table. Yep.
Glenda Pereira: 05:50
But something you said, so that’s the timeline for applying, but something you had said, you had a lot of experience. And before even the application process, what are some things that you have to consider, you have to think about, the skills you have to build to even get to the point of where you’re thinking about an application. And this can be brief, but I previously taught a class where a lot of students wanted to go to vet school. And there’s just so much information to know. And the prep starts really when you potentially are a sophomore in your undergraduate program because you need specific classes to get into vet school.
Glenda Pereira: 06:36
Vet school, you need a certain amount of hours. So you’re starting that process way before you even say, I’m gonna apply to vet school.
Maddy Philbrick: 06:46
Yeah. So there’s a program called, I believe it’s VMSAR, Veterinary Medical School Admission Requirements. And in there, it’s gonna outline all of the prereqs for every vet school that there is. It’s housed in the same websites as the VMCAS. But that’s where you should start.
Maddy Philbrick: 07:05
GPAs, the average GPAs, really all of those statistics that you’re gonna want to know about a school. Because I’ve seen this before. Students can apply. I mean, if you have the money and you wanna apply to 15 schools, go you, go ahead. But are you just throwing away your application to some of those schools too?
Maddy Philbrick: 07:25
You wanna really know the schools you’re applying to, why they’re of value, and then what they’re looking for in an applicant. There was one school that I wanted to apply to and I had a C minus in Chem II. I’m four years out of undergrad. I’m not retaking Chem II. I’m just not gonna do it.
Maddy Philbrick: 07:45
It wasn’t in my values for my journey. But had I still submitted there, they would have thrown out my application before it ever even got to our review committee. And it’s like $154 after the first application for each additional school. Yep. It’s a $150 that I would have thrown away to that school, basically.
Glenda Pereira: 08:06
What’s the fee, initial fee?
Maddy Philbrick: 08:08
I believe it was $250, $260. There are some scholarship waivers for that first fee. So if you get an application fee waiver, they will waive that first initial fee. I had applied for one of those to help with subsidizing some of the costs.
Maddy Philbrick: 08:26
There is some financial help. And then each school is allowed to also assess a school fee for your application. And those can vary. Some are $50, some are up to $150. And again, they are at their discretion, may have programs to help with some of those costs because it can get very expensive.
Glenda Pereira: 08:46
To apply.
Maddy Philbrick: 08:46
Yeah. Just to apply, you could, depending on how many schools and the application fees, I mean, you could easily spend $1,500, $2,000 applying. Yeah. Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 08:58
And so something you said, being strategic, having a plan. I’m gonna apply to these schools because I know the grades I’ve received in my previous classes are accepted. I know I meet all the criteria. I’m not wasting my money potentially. Or you are definitely wasting your money if you don’t meet the criteria for certain schools.
Glenda Pereira: 09:18
Because like you said, it won’t move forward in the process for that school. Was there anything you thought about when you were choosing the schools you wanted to apply to?
Maddy Philbrick: 09:27
So part of it was location. So I applied to one of the schools I applied to because I have a sister that lives nearby. And thinking about moving across the country, I just wanted potentially there to be family nearby. My partner’s family also lives out on the West Coast. So having the ability to have somebody there should we need them when we were out there.
Maddy Philbrick: 09:47
So that was part of my consideration. Of course, costs came into play. There were a couple of schools that I was considering. And when I looked into it, it was really cost of living and not tuition. Because no matter what, as a Maine applicant, I was applying as out of state.
Maddy Philbrick: 10:03
If I wanted to apply in state, I would have had to move, establish residency for a year, and then apply to get that cheaper tuition. So to me, I hate to say this because $10,000 a year is a lot of money when you’re four years in, but to me, the necessarily $10,000 wasn’t the big deterrent. It was the cost of living at some of the other places.
Glenda Pereira: 10:27
Yeah. No, that’s incredibly important. And I bet that had you thought about this or applied four years ago during, I can’t remember what year that was, but during the COVID period, you probably maybe would have said, yeah, I’ll move to this place even if the cost of living is high. But now you potentially have a different mindset than you did before.
Maddy Philbrick: 10:55
Yeah. I actually credit myself for taking the time to figure out if this is what I really wanted to do. Honestly, in the last year, I started shadowing at some clinics again. And I got back into the clinic and I felt alive again. Working with large animal vets, that was always like my driver.
Maddy Philbrick: 11:16
What I loved doing when I was doing herd work was vet day was my favorite day because that meant I got to learn something. The driver of that medicine and then being in the small animal clinic and getting to follow the doctors around and genuinely them looking at me as a colleague. And I don’t know if that’s because I’ve already had a master’s degree and a bachelor’s. Like genuinely, my shadowing experience with them was amazing because they knew I did have background and I did know things, so we could have conversations. We’d see a case and if there were any questions, I got to go.
Maddy Philbrick: 11:50
We could talk. I could talk to the doctors. We could bounce things off. I constantly asked them cow questions just to, you know, poke them because they were small animal vets. They were talking about, yeah, my large animal rotation was enough for me. And I’m like, okay, so let’s talk about cows.
Maddy Philbrick: 12:07
Yeah. Just really that’s kind of when I knew, no, this is what I wanna pursue. I’m gonna put the chance out there and submit the application. And I hadn’t applied before now. Like I really, I’d opened the application. I’d started it. I had never gotten as close as I had this time to actually submitting. And it’s because I finally knew it was right for me.
Glenda Pereira: 12:28
Yep. And I think everybody, like you said, this is gonna be personal, right? The path to vet school is gonna be personal and there’s no right or wrong path.
Glenda Pereira: 12:41
It just has to be driven by your wants and really your, not needs, but what drives your soul. Exactly. What drives you? And you mentioned that you felt alive when you got back into some of these. Well, you have to write up.
Maddy Philbrick: 12:59
Personal essay too. And your personal statement, I mean, it’s personal. I’ve reviewed a few. And really when it comes down to it, it’s more for editing, grammar. Maybe elaborate more on this.
Maddy Philbrick: 13:10
I want to see your passion. And I kept that in mind when I was writing mine. And it was really hard to come up with what was my driving moment and what is it that I want to share with them. And honestly, what it came down to is really the moment that I decided, no, I do want to re pursue veterinary medicine. And unfortunately, that was when I was in the hospital sick for two weeks.
Maddy Philbrick: 13:33
But I credit the GI specialist that I had. His name was Joe Harkins. I love him. I will always speak greatly of him. But he would come into my hospital room every day and we would chat, and we would chat about medical terminology.
Maddy Philbrick: 13:46
And he really came up on the level of like, I’m going to talk to you more of a colleague than as a patient. And he was like, why didn’t you ever apply? And he asked me that for ten days straight, every day when he came in, why did you never apply to veterinary school? And I could never give him an answer, ever. It really made me realize maybe I was on autopilot more than I had thought.
Maddy Philbrick: 14:10
I was passionate about what I was doing. I liked what I was doing. There was something driving me to get out of bed every day. But was it what drove my soul? Yeah.
Maddy Philbrick: 14:20
And he made me reflect on that. And that is what the basis of my personal statement was written on. Maybe that helped too. I don’t know. It might have been a good one.
Maddy Philbrick: 14:32
It seemed it was just that piece of like, you do have to get personal. And it will be strangers that read your personal essay. But the better you are at being real with them of why, that’s really what will help you.
Maddy Philbrick: 14:51
And also don’t be afraid to put it all down at first. My personal statement was four pages. That’s not allowed. It has to, I think it’s a thousand characters or something. It has to get really short.
Maddy Philbrick: 15:03
So you’re taking it down to slightly less than a page is what it comes down to. But get it all out first. Like I wrote it all out. I gave the details of what I wanted to say. Put it all on paper.
Maddy Philbrick: 15:14
Now, how do I cut it down? Yeah. So really, really putting in time to that essay. There’s more essays you may write through the application process. There’s a lot of supplements depending on the school.
Maddy Philbrick: 15:25
But that personal one, make sure it’s solid. And then as you go on to the supplement ones, that can get drawing off the personal one but still answering their question can also be helpful.
Glenda Pereira: 15:36
Yeah. And you reminded me of something that you just said. Your grades aren’t everything. No, they’re not.
Glenda Pereira: 15:43
They are a criteria that you need to meet to even get your application reviewed, right? But after that, you know, if all you have are your grades, well, if you’re not able to connect through your personal statement, if you don’t have any experience, really, your chances might be reduced. From what I know, vet school is something that is a whole package. It’s not just one thing.
Maddy Philbrick: 16:15
Yeah. So I’m a lifelong learner. I like to learn. I’m not gonna say that I learn everything the first go. My undergrad transcript’s not perfect.
Maddy Philbrick: 16:24
I took a couple Ws and retook classes. There was a D on my transcript that I tried my butt off that whole semester. I retook the class and I got a B plus the second time I took it. I also got way more out of that class.
Maddy Philbrick: 16:41
It doesn’t have to be perfect. You should strive to do better. Like I said, I wasn’t retaking Chem II. I didn’t retake it in undergrad. I wasn’t gonna put myself through it again. Was I a perfect GPA applicant?
Maddy Philbrick: 16:52
No. Was I necessarily what we considered like a low GPA applicant? No. I was probably that happy medium. But I did use that in making my decisions on selecting schools because I knew that.
Maddy Philbrick: 17:05
I knew that there were a few classes that they were prereqs and there was a minimum on the prereq for what your grade could be. So making sure that I selected schools that I still met the minimums on all prereqs. But they just wanna see you. Your degree doesn’t have to be in animal science. It doesn’t have to be in biology.
Maddy Philbrick: 17:23
It can be in something else. But if you’re coming from English, why do you want to be a vet? If you can prove that you’re super passionate about English and also super passionate about medicine through your experiences, that’s fine. You just also have to have those prereqs done. And yeah, just crafting your path along the way.
Maddy Philbrick: 17:41
They want to see research, animal experience hours, veterinary experience hours, and then your other extracurriculars as well. Veterinary hours, I think people put a lot of emphasis on them. But the other areas are just as important. Of course, shadowing a veterinarian and figuring out what they do is very important. But making sure that you also expand your horizons to learn.
Glenda Pereira: 18:07
And that’s how you get recommendation letters.
Maddy Philbrick: 18:10
Right. So most schools require at least one veterinary recommendation. So you are gonna have to make friends with a veterinarian along the way that sees your potential. I was fortunate and I had two veterinarians that were able to write me recommendations. I had a small animal practice and a large animal practice.
Maddy Philbrick: 18:25
And then professors. So Dr. Knight wrote me a recommendation since he was my master’s thesis advisor. And then Dave Marcinkowski wrote me a recommendation because he’s been influential all my life in so many other ways as a mentor. But building those connections along the way of like, who are the people that are gonna paint me in the best light and can speak about me in the best way to make this committee see that I will be a great vet.
Glenda Pereira: 18:53
Yeah. And give specifics. You don’t want somebody to write a recommendation that says, you know, Maddy’s great. She did great in this capacity. She was awesome.
Glenda Pereira: 19:03
Right? I met Maddy during this time. The interaction we had was this. We had this conversation. I saw that she connected the dots.
Glenda Pereira: 19:13
She put the theory to practice. And so I really think that will help her in her role as a future veterinarian. That’s the type of language and narrative you want in your recommendation letter. And so I mention this because that relationship is not built overnight. So start looking for those mentors your sophomore year of undergrad.
Glenda Pereira: 19:38
It might not happen right away, but start trying to find the people in your network that will be able to speak on specific experiences. Not just, I had the student in my one class, they came to shadow one time. Those recommendation letters aren’t gonna give people an idea of who you are. It’s gonna be the connecting piece, right? I want this person to come to vet school because they’re a great colleague.
Glenda Pereira: 20:05
And, you know, look at how in the recommendation they mentioned these two things. And I think that could add to the knowledge base of our students that are incoming January 2026 or whatever it is. So build those relationships as soon as you can because you can’t expect someone to write out a recommendation letter after knowing them for a month.
Maddy Philbrick: 20:26
No, definitely not. And I’ve written recommendation letters for vet schools. Some of them I knew great, and it was so easy. And others, it was difficult to write them a good recommendation letter because it wasn’t that I wasn’t willing. I just had only had maybe two interactions actually with them as a person. There’s sometimes requirements on who the recommenders should be.
Maddy Philbrick: 20:48
So like, should they be an academic advisor? Should they be a professor? Employers can be fine, but it depends on the school. There’s some schools that are very specific, and they’ll only look at three of your recommendations. So you can upload up to six.
Maddy Philbrick: 21:03
But some will be you have to name the ones you want them to look at. So keeping that in mind too in that process of like, how am I gonna paint myself? And then if I have to choose which ones they’re gonna read, who do I think is gonna paint me in the best light? Because you don’t get to read the recommendations, right?
Maddy Philbrick: 21:21
I think technically, you can waive your right to read them. But it’s always been very standard that you should waive your right to reading because it’s a blind read, basically, of who you are as a person.
Glenda Pereira: 21:37
Yeah. And so we’re kind of wrapping things up here. So thanks so much, Maddy. And come back next week to learn about part two. So for folks who have future topics, suggestions, comments, questions for the podcast and Farmcast, Colt will catch me for that.
Glenda Pereira: 21:58
Be sure to email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.