What Does It Take To Get Into Vet School?

Posted onAuthorsostermannblog@gmail.com6 Comments

You may be asking yourself, what do I have to do to get into vet school? Every year, thousands of applicants submit their best attempts at gaining access to a coveted seat at one of the 28 veterinary schools in the United States. Unfortunately, due to the limited number of schools, the number of applicants admitted every year is not very high. This is good because it keeps job demand up, making it almost certain that we’ll find a job when we graduate (which is not always a given, especially in this economy).

Given the competitive nature of applying to veterinary school, you want to put your best foot forward but you must realize that you don’t have to be perfect (or even close) to get admitted. I have collected various admissions statistics for the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis and posted them below. These statistics will give you an idea of what each class looks like overall, demographics (age, gender, ethnicity), educational background, average GPA, GRE, hours of experience, and field of interest. You will notice that not much of this changes from year to year.

Application Stats – 2009
Application Stats – 2010
Application Stats – 2011
Application Stats – 2012
Application Stats – 2013
Application Stats – 2014
Application Stats – 2015
Application Stats – 2019
Application Stats – 2020

Now what do I expect you to do with this information? Not much, really. I want to give you an idea of what is typical, but stress the fact that these are averages and that there are people that will be far above and far below the average values — especially with number of hours of experience! There are some applicants that have over 20,000 hours of experience and when you average their numbers with people who have a more modest number of hours, like me, the average appears artificially inflated. Perhaps a median number would be a better number to report (but that’s my stats background talking).

Also, please note how many application cycles it took students to gain admission. While the majority of students are admitted on their first application, a good proportion must apply multiple times.

Please take this information with a grain of salt. I will be posting in the future with information on gaining experience in the field as that is a huge part of your application that is not adequately represented in those statistics.

Application Stats – 2014

6 thoughts on “What Does It Take To Get Into Vet School?”

  1. I want to go to UCLA , and study to become a wildlife vet tech. at UCLA do they have anything with veterinary medicine?

  2. I want to go to UCLA , and study to become a wildlife vet tech. at UCLA do they have anything with veterinary medicine?

  3. @monica, I’m currently a senior at ucla and was prevet president last year. They don’t have a animal science major or anything really veterinary specific but you can easily fulfill all your prereqs here and it is a great school to go to with an awesome faculty and plenty of research opportunities. Ucla also has many animal hospitals near by to work at and also there is a wildlife center in malibu and a bird research rescue center in san Pedro. There are plenty of places to gain experience but most of it is self motivated. Hope that helps!

  4. @monica, I’m currently a senior at ucla and was prevet president last year. They don’t have a animal science major or anything really veterinary specific but you can easily fulfill all your prereqs here and it is a great school to go to with an awesome faculty and plenty of research opportunities. Ucla also has many animal hospitals near by to work at and also there is a wildlife center in malibu and a bird research rescue center in san Pedro. There are plenty of places to gain experience but most of it is self motivated. Hope that helps!

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