Engineer vs Vet

Tarkan

Well-Known Member
Afternoon folks

I need help making a decision that will affect the rest of my life, I'm currently a second year Aerospace engineering student but the spark has gone for the subject, I'm dreading going into Uni in the morning as well as graduating and having to go and find a desk job!

An opportunity has arose for me to start on a veterinary medicine course come October, so I suppose the question is thus what the feck should I do?

Tarkan
 
As the son of a vet of 40 years large and small practice I can give you my observations on the change to the "industry" over the past 30 years
It is no longer a profession IMO, it is an industry and the prevalence of insurance and litigation has removed the need for skilled diagnosis and replaced it with testing and procedures that at no particular cost to the animal owner are now considered acceptable. ("Hip replacement on a 11 year old labrador?" "sure, why not!? you insurance will cover it!")

As a recruiter and career coach I can offer you some wider advice from an industry perspective. ​happy to do this by PM if you want
 
Last edited:
Just had to fork out £190 for a blood test and swab for my bitch, become a vet and become rich :)
 
I did a degree in mechanical engineering and after serving a couple of years in engineering ended up drifting into IT. If I had my time over again I'd love to do something like veterinary medicine. Both of your options are very worthy career paths and without the benefit of hindsight what have you got to lose by following your heart and going with what you are passionate about?

​Alex
 
if you are not happy with what your doing i would reccommend a change, nothing as bad as doing something you hate. good luck whatever you decide
 
You want our help on a life changing decision, your mad :lol:
If a desk job doesn't appeal why look for one, there is more to aerospace engineering than a desk job.
But if the idea of becoming a vet appeals to you go for it, after all we will always have animals, we may not
always have a British aerospace industry.

Neil. :)
 
I have a few vet friends, tough work, long hours, lots of night work early in their careers, challenging getting work in the locations/regions where you'd actually like to live, compensation/pay is 'ok', but hey, you're saving animals lives, that in itself is a beautiful thing. On the flip side, you might see a lot of terrifying and saddening things too, but it comes with the job.

Aerospace engineer, R&D, Desk, in-field, good pay, good pension, ability to become a self employed consultant,,,sounds pretty good to me;)
 
A few points..

for the same entry grades,(more or less) Dr's and dentists earn more money. Dentistry also has far better hours. And the suicide rate in veterinary is very high :lol: and I'm just going to put it out there that veterinary is a harder course than the other two as well...


but if your hating the course why stick to it?
 
My wife's a vet, and I've seen both sides of it close up.

It can be tremendously exhilirating: there's the thrill of the chase when it comes to puzzling out the diagnosis, and conducting successful treatments (surgical or otherwise). There's the real pleasure to be got from saving the animal's lives or improving their well being. There's the interaction with new people all the time, many of whom really appreciative. There's the cradle-to-grave (or blanket-to-shoebox) relationship you develop with certain anaimals.

But it can be sould destroying. The general rule now is that new vets are employed as part of increasingly large and faceless corporate practices, where decisions are made on the basis of priorities set by head offices, shareholders or H&S goons with no real knowledge of (or indeed interest in) animal welfare (or, come to that, human welfare). Junior (and even mod level) vets have very little say in how to run thier cases, and often get denied the opportunity to see cases through from start to finish. Even when decisions are left to the individual, a great many treatable animals are put down because their owners can't afford them (no insurance) or can't be bothered. It can get very monotonous: for every exciting surgery, you have to preform 100 cat spays or rabbit tooth extractions. And finally there's just the depressing inevitability that about 85% of the problems you encounter are simply down to human idiocy: inbreeding, poor diet, poor excercise, neglect, ignorance etc etc.

On balance, I would still say go for it. I quite often regret not having become a vet. I became a field biolgist instead, and ofetn think I'd have been happier doing something with real, tangible value. And that's one of the most appealing things about it: you get presented with a problem which almost always has a solution, there is no moral ambiguity about the value of what you're doing, and at the end of the day, you go home knowing that what you did had a measureable, tangible, meaningful impact that is almost always for the good. Very few preofessions can say that.

I'll end by saying that there are astonishingly few good vets, so there's always room for more.
 
There is a lot to be said for regular hours, fixed days off and no phone calls on the days off that you do get.

I know the drama of swinging into action to save the day may have a certain appeal now but as you get older you can't keep that pace up any more and working long days or full months without a day off or a whole year with only two weekends off soon starts to wear pretty thin, especially when your mates no longer even bother to ask you out as they know you'll let them down. This isn't helped when you find your managers wander in about 1100, head out to the pub for an hour for lunch and then run off home about 1600 "to miss the rush hour."

So, if you fancy going the "irregular hour" route which might be where you'd end up as a vet you need to have a good escape plan. Sitting in an office 9 - 5 doing calcs might be boring but at least some part of your life is your own and you can chose to live this part of your life and just turn up and do what you can while in work.
 
I'll just quickly add that for most small animal vets, after 3-5 years in practice, you generally end up with little or no out of hours if you don't weant it. Almost all the city/large town practices contract thier OOH out to specialist emergency clinics. This has it's positives (you get a life) and it's negatives (you aren't involved when an animal you know has an emergency, which may make a huge difference to what happens - and to how the clients feel about it).

For large animal vets, of course, the James Herriot call outs are still very much the rule. Hence my wife (who specialised as an equine cet origonally) is now 100% small animal! Freezing barns at 3 in the morning lose thier appeal very fast.
 
Afternoon folks

I need help making a decision that will affect the rest of my life, I'm currently a second year Aerospace engineering student but the spark has gone for the subject, I'm dreading going into Uni in the morning as well as graduating and having to go and find a desk job!

An opportunity has arose for me to start on a veterinary medicine course come October, so I suppose the question is thus what the feck should I do?

Tarkan


I don't think wanting to be a vet is something you have to think about. I think it's one of those jobs you just know you want to do, and work to achieve. To me, the fact that you're asking the question, would suggest that it's not something you feel passionately about, and you're only thinking about it because it's an "out" from the engineering !


Maybe you need to take a little time to try and work out what really does appeal to you. I know easier said, than done.


Good luck with your decision.


Mark.
 
My philosophy is "Don't waste time doing something you don't want to do. Life's too short."
Stuck to my dream since I was 6 yrs old, and never wavered.
If you made a wrong choice then you'll only be miserable if you stick at it.
 
What a massive difference, do you have the sufficient qualies and grades? Going through it with my son at the moment having being accepted to 4 different unis it has to be your decision, after being on placement at vets he found that the job was not as expected. Lucky for him he was advised by the young vets in the practice it did not stand up to there expectations. He is looking to go down the path to become a doctor, with something like this you need professional advice as well as peoples opinions.
 
vet +1 as thay are not sending any one to space anytime soon, unless you find a role within telecom's aerospace
its all about the cash nowdays ,the days of James Herriot pen name of a real vet are long gone
 
Afternoon folks

I need help making a decision that will affect the rest of my life, I'm currently a second year Aerospace engineering student but the spark has gone for the subject, I'm dreading going into Uni in the morning as well as graduating and having to go and find a desk job!

An opportunity has arose for me to start on a veterinary medicine course come October, so I suppose the question is thus what the feck should I do?

Tarkan

I would maybe urge a note of caution.

At about exactly the same point through my University degree I was hit by just the same thoughts. I couldn't see the point of what I was doing and questioned why I had chosen the course in the first place. I felt that I should have followed my first instinct, which was to do a course more "land" based at an Agricultural college.

Having decided that a change was required, I made the necessary enquiries. I then sat down for a cup of coffee with the neighbour of my parents, who happened to be a lecturer in psychology. She took me right the way through my thought process, and I realised that actually a change of career would still be open to me once I had finished my first degree, which was only a little more than 12 months away. If I wanted to, having graduated, I could go then to Agricultural college and pursue another degree. Okay, so it meant continuing with the current course, but if I was going to jack that in after two years who was to say that I wouldn't look to jack in the Agricultural course after the same amount of time? In the end I persevered with my first choice, from which kicked off a set of circumstances that took me into a career that has paid me to travel the world.

I still sometimes hanker after that job based outside rather than behind a desk (read "hunched over a keyboard") but even at my age there is still time for that in the future.

Of course I was at University at the time when we were paid to be there, rather than taking on huge debts, which I know makes it much more of a difficult choice for you. But life has a remarkable way of working out sometimes.

So rather than seeking the opinions of a bunch of largely nameless, faceless, people on an Internet Forum, why not seek professional help from someone who can advise you on the career choice that's really right for you? It will be money well spent and may settle your mind both now and in the future.

willie_gunn
 
Last edited:
Afternoon folks

I need help making a decision that will affect the rest of my life, I'm currently a second year Aerospace engineering student but the spark has gone for the subject, I'm dreading going into Uni in the morning as well as graduating and having to go and find a desk job!

An opportunity has arose for me to start on a veterinary medicine course come October, so I suppose the question is thus what the feck should I do?

Tarkan

RAF?

13 years to push for a half pension, milk it for all the qualifications and experiences you can get, loads of sport and adventure training, travel the world and meet interesting people(?).
 
Having spent all my working life as an engineer - working for the "man" in both large & small companies in a wide range of industries, I got disillusioned by the politics all too often getting in the way of the engineering.:banghead:
I always wished I'd become an architect or got into the FC / Land management field, but it was to late when I realized it was too late to change path.
I'd say don't look at what courses are available today - that can lead you down a path that you can't get back up - Decide what you really want to do & go for it.
Be careful not to get too specialized in something that is the current fad - there is the dinosaur syndrome to beware of.
I regret not having been self employed so you should maybe put that into the melting pot too!
Good luck with your decisions.

Ian

P.s. Thank God I'm retired now!! - Oops I got disillusioned with him also long ago!!!:scared:
 
Life choices are hard sometimes but better to finish what you start before making another. I have chopped about a bit first time at college to study Electronics and Electrical Engineering as I had an interest in it from a young age. I finished the course and started work in Electronics but being an outdoors kind of person soon got bored building, testing and repairing equipment for commercial radio stations. Time for a change and I got into Agricultural College to study wildlife management and had the best time of my life (started staking for one). Left college again after finishing the course but work was hard to find and spent year or two as a forestry contractor. Poor pay, cold in the winter wet in the summer. Then met my wife to be and realized that I was going to need ££££ real £££ for the future so difficult as it was I eventually ended up working in mobile telecoms and have now for the past 15 years having traveled the world (bad part as had to give up my FAC and sell guns) and worked both outdoors surveying and indoors designing networks and now looking at stats and delivering services to our customers. I now shoot when I want earn a good living and have a family life and all that goes with it. If I had my time again I would have done it differently but I won’t ever get it back and would not have some wonderful memories and experiences that I cherish today.
 
Interested what the other vets on here have to say.

The universities are working on a huge over-supply of vets. Surrey (really) is opening a vet college and 2 other unis are considering it. In 10 years time there will be a huge over-supply. We are just starting to see newly qualified vets struggle to find jobs - when I qualified in 2006 I had a job sorted in the Feb when I graduated in July.

There are more and more practices, many not owned by vets. Many owned by big cooperate chains. They behave aggressively undercutting the existing practices to get a market-hold. That drops everyone's income.

If you think vets are rich you need to have a reality check. I've never paid higher rate tax in my life. As a 1 year qualified vet I saw an advert for a night shift manager in Tesco and they offered more money than I was taking home as a salary. If I worked out my hourly rate when employed and included on call time I'd be on less than minimum wage.

I work about 50 hours per week and then spend 1 night in 4 on call. I'm a 'proper' vet so I do large animal work and at this time of year (lambing) we are busy. Not had a night for a while with sleep not disturbed at one end or the other. When I work a weekend I start 8.30am Saturday and finish 6.00 pm Monday.

It's not well paid. It tied up huge chunks of your life. Can't go out, can't have a drink. Can be very stressful (although I am as laid back as you can get).

I love my job but you sure as hell need to do it for the love of it, not for the money or the hours. Think very long and very hard.

(horse with colic 6am :D)
 
Back
Top