Landing a Spot in Veterinary School

About

Name	Lucy Macdonell
Title	Candidate, DVM
Location	Western College of Veterinary Medicine
Grad year	2024
Program	Honours Applied Biology
Major	Applied Animal Biology

Lucy Macdonell completed an Honours BSc in Applied Animal Biology at the
Faculty of Land and Food Systems in 2024. This year she began her Doctor of
Veterinary Medicine (DVM) at the Western college of Veterinary Medicine in
Saskatoon. While at UBC, Lucy has been clear about her ambition to pursue
veterinary medicine for most of her life and sought out opportunities related to
wildlife, dairy farms and research to clarify and confirm this ambition. In this
profile, she shares more about how her experience at LFS helped her to get into
vet school.

Why have you decided that you want to become a vet?

Like many aspiring pre-vet students, I’ve wanted to go into veterinary medicine since I was quite young! In addition to that original seed, what has persisted throughout these years is my passion, and above all, curiosity for medicine. This field is incredibly unique in that it gives you the ability to empower clients to take autonomy over their pets’ health. I hope to incorporate this approach and these values into whichever specialization I pursue.

How did your time at LFS help you to shape this path?

Over the course of five years, my degree at LFS propelled me forward by providing diverse opportunities for veterinary experience that expanded my understanding and passion for the profession. In particular, my experience as a research assistant in the Animal Welfare Program still informs my approach to medicine, and my belief that academia is indispensable in the veterinary medicine space. Additionally, my student leadership roles in LFS were formative experiences that improved my public speaking, and in the long run aided my performance in the entrance interview for WCVM.

When it comes to your future, what are you most excited about?

Being at WCVM (even having just started in September!) has been such an amazing and eye-opening experience. Despite the high workload and expectations, I like to remind myself how hard I’ve worked to be here and how grateful I am to be in a program where every single class is relevant to my future career. I’m excited to continue to be exposed to new experiences and meet students and professors from such diverse backgrounds, who have come together through a shared passion for veterinary medicine and education.

Gaining admittance to veterinary school can be very competitive. What do you think contributed to your success?

Gaining entrance into a competitive veterinary school, specifically WCVM, truly depends on the balance between your academics and breadth of experience. I believe the diversity of my experiences outside of academics – whether it was my semester abroad or my behavioural research in rural Thailand – demonstrated my passion for the profession and desire to continually improve my skillset. Academics are so important, but what I always recommend to pre-vet students is to push outside their comfort zone when it comes to extracurriculars.

The number of opportunities available to you especially within LFS, and more broadly across UBC, is truly infinite, and I took advantage of this. Customize your degree! Your undergraduate only happens once, and I cannot emphasize how much extracurriculars matter when it comes to developing long-term life skills and building your resume – even outside of pursuing veterinary medicine. Keep your eye on the prize and have fun along the way!

How did you find opportunities while at LFS?

My biggest piece of advice for a student aspiring to go into veterinary medicine is to take advantage of the close-knit nature of LFS and reach out to your profs! So many of my opportunities originated from engaging with the faculty and simply asking good questions where I cared about the answer. During my time at UBC, I continuously reached out to people to conduct ‘informational interviews’ to understand their career path and ask for advice. In addition to building my network within the field, it opened the door to research opportunities eventually leading to my honours thesis and a part-time job during my studies.

Most of the groundwork I did to find these connections and opportunities was during my study breaks, which I highly recommend. During your off time you can comb through the LFS Newslettuce, Work Learn job postings or even email a researcher whose paper you really enjoyed. It makes you feel productive (because it is!) and takes your mind off the impending doom of a BIOL 200 paper.

This strategy resulted in me pushing through a Go Global application, and my eventual exchange semester at an agricultural college in France called ESA. Despite not being veterinary focused, this experience created some of my favourite memories in my undergraduate without compromising my GPA. Often as a prospective veterinary student, the medical opportunities you desire will be in small quantities. Using extracurriculars such as research and volunteering is a great way to gain experience while at school and without compromising your academics in the process. Veterinary schools take into consideration the extracurriculars you have in addition to your course load; therefore, I recommend balancing these two aspects to build the best application.

From your experience, what has been the value of having an LFS degree?

Being at LFS for 5 years, I gained such an amazing community that I wouldn’t exchange for anything. It is very valuable to feel the support of, not only your fellow students, but your faculty as well. Being in a smaller faculty gave me endless opportunities to innovate and bring those connections into my career, propelling me to where I am today. Following my entrance to WCVM, I emailed so many professors and faculty members that have helped me along the way to let them know – I don’t know of many faculties that have this level of community, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it.

Almost every position on my resume stemmed from connecting with one of my professors or faculty members and asking them, what can I do next? Faculty in LFS get to know your name and your personality, and that is indispensable when it comes to finding opportunities that fit your skillset and interests, which eventually gets you to the next step of your career.

Have you achieved any awards or honours that you would like us to highlight?

During my time at UBC, I took an Honours Animal Biology Degree which required completion of an additional 9 credits and an undergraduate thesis. This was by no means necessary to gain entrance to WCVM, but I believe really helped hone my writing skills and reinforced my work ethic and self-motivation with carbon steel as the course is primarily self-paced. I received the Dave Currey Award, HM King Prize in Animal Science, and the EA Lloyd Prize in Poultry Science during my final graduating year.