Change is in the air, just ask the decaying cattails from winter past, the blackbirds bantering back and forth, and the quail re-welcoming spring with very early morning calls (much to my husband’s disdain)!
Change can be challenging in academia — adapting, rethinking, responding, or even leading. There are so many areas where our college has led in the educational arena. We were the first college of veterinary medicine to move to pass/no-pass grading, and our college was the first veterinary school in the world to launch a formal teaching academy to support and develop excellence in teaching, to name just two.
There are some areas where we are not the first, but we are eager to adopt and implement. For example, we are working hard to embed a veterinary technician (nursing) training program in our college. This would be a wonderful way to teach teamwork and to provide pathways for pre-veterinarian and animal adjacent students to contribute to our profession without attending veterinary school. And it would address critical workforce shortages here and all around the region — to name just one.
And then there are some areas when the path forward is simply more controversial, less straightforward, or slow to emerge. Right now, there is a national shortage of large-animal and rural-serving veterinarians. Our primary goal is to provide the very best educational and clinical experiences we can for aspiring large animal veterinarians. But this training must acknowledge that the demographics of farms and rural populations have changed dramatically and our caseload in our in-house large animal service (cows, goats, sheep, and pigs) has been declining for years. Re-imagining how we serve animals where they are — extension centers, satellite clinics, fairgrounds — is top of mind and conversations. I like the vision coming out of these discussions, but it is a fundamental shift in where and how we provide clinical training.
Similarly, how we adapt and evolve our pre-clinical education by scaffolding the training of students in anesthesia and surgical techniques using simulation, virtual reality tools, cadavers (donated by clients after being euthanized due to natural disease processes), and real animals (most notably our spay/neuter program for local shelters) is complex. What do our students need to be successful on day one of their careers? What does our society expect or tolerate for animal use in education? How do we help students be brave and confident? These conversations need to be nuanced, engage a variety of stakeholders, and be held with the knowledge that change is constant. Because it is, and that is OK, better than OK — it allows us to be excellent.
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Be safe, healthy, happy, and stay hopeful. As I said on my first day on the job, the future is bright.
Take care and Go Cougs!