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The finale of my vet-school series, on passing the licensing exam, choosing theriogenology, and where the writing goes next.
This is the last post in the series. I started writing about veterinary school four years ago, as a student who did not know where he would end up, and I am finishing it as someone who has graduated and passed the national veterinary licensing exam. So it is true now in a way it was not when I began: I am a veterinarian.
I did not expect the series to matter to anyone but me. It grew out of a simple frustration. When I was applying, there was almost no current, trustworthy information about what veterinary school and the profession were actually like, and I wanted to leave something better behind for the people coming after me. Over the years it collected a few hundred comments from around a hundred different people, most of them asking for guidance. Several juniors have told me they found the blog before they ever entered veterinary school. That is the part I did not anticipate and value most, the sense that the writing did some real good.
I thought about turning these posts into a book, or moving them to a cleaner platform. In the end I left them where they were, mostly so they would keep turning up in searches for the students who need them. I will also point people toward a veterinary guide that colleagues I met during field training recently published. It is more current than my own posts, which have started to date, and I would rather send readers to good information than protect my own.
If this series records anything honestly, it is that I did not know what I wanted, for a long time. In second year I was set on cardiac surgery. Early in third year I chased international organizations and epidemiology, then found the work did not move me. Later that year I drifted back to cardiology. By fourth year I had landed somewhere I would not have predicted at the start: theriogenology, the study of reproduction.
I want to be candid that this was not a straight line, because the tidy version, where a student knows from the beginning and marches toward it, is a fiction. My path wandered, and the wandering was not wasted. Each turn ruled something out and taught me a little more about what I actually respond to.
I enrolled in a combined master's and doctoral program in veterinary theriogenology at my alma mater. Several things pulled me toward it. It sits at the intersection of clinical work and research, so it does not force me to give up either. It connects closely to large-animal medicine, where reproduction is central. It lets me avoid trading away my whole life to full-time clinical practice, which I had come to know was not what I wanted. And it puts me around experimental design and faculty I want to learn from.
There is a practical dimension too. The integrated degree lets me complete my military service through the researcher exemption, which matters at this stage of a Korean man's life more than it might sound from the outside.
I am going to keep two homes online. This blog will continue, but lighter, with graduate-school anecdotes and research tips for students who are further along than the ones I first wrote for. Alongside it I am building a separate professional site in English, meant to position me among international researchers rather than domestic applicants. The two audiences are different enough that they deserve different pages.
I am grateful to everyone who read along, and especially to the people who wrote to me with their own questions and doubts. If I can leave the next generation of veterinarians with anything, it is this: gather varied experience before you decide, take the question of who you want to be in this profession seriously, and aim at something that means more to you than routine. Veterinary medicine is unusual in how much it can help, across every kind of animal. I would rather see graduates become people who make a difference in it than people who simply pass through.
I have a longer goal in mind that I am not ready to name yet. I would rather earn the standing to say it first, and then say it plainly once I have done the work. For now it is enough to write down the simple fact this series was always heading toward. And so I became a veterinarian.