Veterinary school is rigorous and competitive, and according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, clinical rotations — when doctors begin to treat actual patients — are the most demanding. Students at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM), said long hours and grueling circumstances impact their wellbeing. But experts and college officials said finding solutions that work for everyone can be tough.
Much like medical doctors, doctors of veterinary medicine must complete a minimum of four years of professional schooling after an undergraduate degree to become licensed. Most programs have three years of classroom instruction and one year of hands-on work to learn to treat real patients — this portion is known as clinical rotations.
But at the Mizzou CVM, students spend a little over two years in the classroom and around 19 months in clinical training. During clinicals, students rotate through different areas of the University of Missouri’s Veterinary Health Center to learn a variety of skills. With clinical rotations come long hours and demanding schedules.
Studies show veterinary students experience higher-than-average levels of stress during their schooling, and the AVMA has acknowledged recent news stories about veterinary programs where students reported circumstances that impacted their wellbeing.
At Mizzou CVM, some students say the clinical learning environment is creating poor working conditions. In 2023, Mizzou students began recording their experiences in an anonymous document that KBIA was given access to. One student said this:
“For two weeks I did not see the sun coming or going to work, even though it was late summer. I cried almost daily coming home. Sometimes I started crying as I walked out the doors of the hospital. I cried from exhaustion. I cried from frustration. I cried because I couldn’t feel any other emotion besides stress. I cried because I couldn’t be in four places at once. Their expectations were higher than we could reasonably achieve, and I was trying so hard. I wanted their approval, and I wanted better for my patients.”
Taylor Miller is a veterinarian, therapist, and mental health advocate with Not One More Vet, an organization that advocates for the wellbeing of veterinary professionals. She said excessively long hours aren’t conducive to a positive learning environment.
“We never talk about sleep deprivation enough, and if you are sleep deprived, your brain literally cannot learn at the same rate, quality, etc.,” Miller said. And student schedules are often set up such that sleep deprivation is unavoidable.
Guidelines aim to create a standard — and face an uphill battle
Due to negative student experiences, the Student American Veterinary Medical Association, or SAVMA, began releasing a set of duty hour guidelines in 2011. The guidelines, which were updated in August of 2024, include recommendations such as a 60 hour per-week limit for clinical work, limits of 16 hours per continuous on-site shift, allowances for medical appointments, required time for meal breaks and more.
Megan Gulsby is the national wellbeing coordinator for SAVMA and a student at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. Gulsby said the guidelines are not mandatory, but they provide schools with guidance on appropriate working conditions — and schools are encouraged to follow them.
“SAVMA does not have any direct authoritative power. We can only suggest things to our administrations and give feedback as students,” Gulsby said.
Gulsby said few vet schools actually abide by these guidelines, it’s mostly up to the students to make sure they’re enforced.
“These guidelines were created to provide support for vet students to advocate for themselves,” Gulsby said. “So, you know, if they were in a situation where they… weren't getting any days off, they were on call and they got called in, and they were in the hospital for 24 hours and then they didn't get off, and they've been in the hospital for so long - they could kind of have something to back them up and say, hey, you know this is what the National Student Organization has put out for guidelines.”
Mizzou students express concerns over clinical expectations
At Mizzou CVM, many students anonymously detailed clinical working conditions that did not follow SAVMA guidelines. One anonymous student wrote:
“I was in a surgery for over six hours and we were so short on students, that my rotation mates had their own appointments and treatments to perform that nobody could switch me out. After the surgery I had to recover my patient, set up the ICU and treatment sheet, gather medications, call the owners, etc. I did not have anything to eat/drink for over 12 hours. By the time I got home I had a 104 fever and was slurring my words. My boyfriend rushed me to the ER and they said I was very dehydrated and I had to get a 2 liter bolus of IV fluids.”
Austin Kimes is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine who graduated from Mizzou CVM in 2024. He lives in Columbia with his dog, Bear. He recently took his National American Veterinary Licensing Exam and is awaiting results that will enable him to officially practice as a veterinarian. During his time at Mizzou, he said he had many experiences similar to his peers.
“Our equine surgery rotation is notorious for keeping students very long. That was one of my worst,” Kimes said. “I think one week I worked like 110 hours.”
During clinicals, students rotate through different areas of the hospital to learn a variety of skills. Kimes said that the most rigorous rotations were equine, emergency and critical care, and oncology. Kimes said it was typical to work around 80 hours per week or more on these rotations with additional on-call shifts, which left little time for meal breaks and virtually no days off.
Plus, some rotations have limited sick days allowed and require students to repeat them if they are exceeded - which can lead to delayed graduation, extra costs and more.
“I think my longest time that I worked ended up being 29 days without a day off,” Kimes said.
Kimes was one of the students who encouraged his peers to begin documenting their experiences, and said that many of the stories told by fellow students followed the same themes —long hours, few breaks and days off, burnout and sickness from exhaustion, and pressure from low staffing in the veterinary hospital.
Mizzou vet school responds
Dr. Leah Cohn is a professor of veterinary medicine and surgery at Mizzou CVM and the associate department chair of the small animal hospital and veterinary medicine and surgery. She said the college is aware of SAVMA guidelines and departments regularly discuss how they can best abide by them.
“We've always tried to stick to those suggestions. And they are suggestions. They're not rules. They're not regulations. It was proposed by students,” Cohn said.
Cohn said that since the guidelines are not official policy, the college can only take action when a student speaks up about a specific clinical experience violating SAVMA guidelines.
“The onus is really on the student to let us know if they have worked excessively. If they worked an overnight, or if they had a really long weekend with their cases, they need to let us know, because we can't know it automatically,” Cohn said. “But there are a number of ways that students can let us know if they don't feel comfortable coming and talking to the faculty they're on with.”
During his time in vet school, Kimes said he spent a lot of time advocating for himself and fellow students. He encouraged students to track their hours and says many routinely recorded work weeks of 80 hours or more. Kimes said he brought this data to the college along with the SAVMA guidelines during his internal medicine rotation, but said the college showed little interest in taking action.
“I ended up having a meeting with that [Internal Medicine] faculty member and another faculty member and just kind of like saying, this was my expectations coming into clinics, and it was: have one weekend off a month, and work less than 80 hours a week…. and he told me that working 80 hours a week is an unrealistic expectation,” Kimes said.
Other students experienced similar conditions and tried to speak up, but were shut down. In the anonymous document, one student wrote:
“I often felt like I had to advocate for my friends and classmates or stand beside them when they advocated for themselves because nobody else would. Doctors and techs and assistants and sometimes other students look down on us when we as students express the need to take care of ourselves. But we are only human and we deserve to be treated as such.”
Though students who contributed to the document wrote of a variety of experiences over a range of different rotations, many detailed conditions that did not follow SAVMA guidelines, such as work weeks that exceeded 60 hours — one student reported working 120 hours in a single week.
At Mizzou CVM, Dr. Cohn said she believes the college fosters a positive learning environment where students are encouraged to speak up and said that overall, she believes the college does abide by SAVMA guidelines.
“I would be surprised to hear that any student worked 120 hours in a week, and I would hope that a student would approach the faculty member that they're on with at that time and let them know if that was happening so that they could talk about why it's happening,” Cohn said. “Is this… voluntary? Because we definitely do have students who've worked through the night on equine and they choose not to go home the next day, they choose to be there. So is this a case where they chose to be there and they could have gone home?”
Experts and advocates weigh in
Not One More Vet's Miller said it can be hard for students to feel comfortable speaking up in a competitive clinical setting.
“It's often unsafe to set boundaries as a vet student in the veterinary world, because whether or not it is real, there's a very real sense that if I try to set a boundary, I will be punished, whether it's through my grade, whether it's through the shifts I'm assigned, whether it's through how people treat me,” Miller said.
Miller believes the burden shouldn’t be placed on students to make cultural change; that it’s up to the institutions. Plus, she said most students don’t have the time, energy or power to advocate for major changes while navigating the fast-paced clinical environment.
"It's basically putting the onus of the change on students when the students don't have the power or safety for that change to be to be effective — because there are a lot of people who will choose the safe path, and unless the whole cohort can stand up together and become safe through through large masses of voices, like any other place where it's power dynamic is a problem, it's going to be hard to see that win in an institution,” Miller said.
According to Gulsby, it’s common for vet schools to be unaware of the actual hours being worked by their students. Mizzou doesn’t require students to clock in and out or track their hours. Gulsby said in her conversations with vet students across the country she’s never heard of a vet school that tracks student hours.
“Our administrations and the AAVMC (American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges), right now, they can say, ‘Oh, we'll look into it. Oh, yeah, we know you're working long hours.’ But until the data is really in their hands, it's kind of the thing where if you can't prove it, is it really happening? I know it's happening, and I'm not trying to discount anyone's experience, because I'm experiencing it too,” Gulsby said.
Gulsby said this is the reason why she and other SAVMA members encourage students to track their own hours in order to keep records for universities.
Tackling reality
If duty hour guidelines were to be implemented and truly followed in a veterinary program like Mizzou’s, it would mean that each student would work no more than 60 hours per week — 20 hours more than the standard work schedule outlined by the United States Department of Labor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that most U.S. veterinarians work more than 40 hours a week, and reports have showed that many rural veterinarians work excessively long hours.
However, research has also shown that industry norms of long work weeks have contributed to burnout and reduced mental wellbeing among those in the veterinary field, and some advocates have called for change.
But Dr. Cohn says it’s just not plausible for the school to implement the guidelines as official protocols. She says one of the reasons is that a “nine-to-five” shift work schedule isn’t always realistic for the veterinary workforce.
“There is a major trend in veterinary medicine that veterinarians are less willing to be on call all the time, every day,” Cohn said. “That is part of the really important shortage we have with rural veterinarians and rural veterinary medicine, because fewer people want to be on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and that is a reason that urban veterinary medicine and corporate practices where shift work has come into play. So it is certainly a trend in veterinary medicine to see more and more of that kind of shift work mentality developing, but it is not a realistic thing to do at an educational institution where you're learning from your case [and when cases require ongoing care].”
Miller said it’s true that some veterinary professionals have to work long hours but she added it’s still important for veterinary professionals to learn what a healthy work environment looks like early on in order to prevent burnout after leaving vet school.
“There's this sense that if we can beat enough perseverance into our students then they will persevere throughout this clinical environment,” Miller said. “What you really need is, how do we help them rise above this clinical environment, reshape it and allow it to be a joyful experience for 40 years of their professional life?”
In Columbia, Austin Kimes is awaiting his test results and contemplating his next steps. One day, he hopes to move to Europe and work as a lab animal veterinarian taking care of animals in research labs.
Kimes said he believes Mizzou's is a vital program for vet students, pet owners, animal lovers and more — especially as one of only 32 vet schools in the United States.
He said these issues around challenging working conditions and vet student burnout aren’t unique to Mizzou, but it’s a problem with veterinary culture that continues into the profession. Kimes envisions a better learning environment for the students who will come after him, and to achieve that, he said big changes are required.
“If something's going wrong, I would expect you [veterinary institutions] to have the integrity to be like, ‘Hey, this is a problem. We acknowledge this, and we can address it,’” Kimes said.
