Pulse
Building a Better Vet
The University of Minnesota's College of Veterinary Medicine is looking for applicants with the right stuff.
Laura Molgaard, D.V.M., apologizes for the boxes, stacks of papers, and the coffee stain on the table in her office as she sits down to talk. While packing for a move to new office quarters, the associate dean for academic and student affairs along with other faculty and staff had been interviewing applicants to the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine. The prospect who sat at the table earlier that day was among 285 hopefuls vying for 90 seats in the class of 2011.
This year’s applicants will be judged in the same way most students who apply to grad school are: by grade point average, GRE score, letters of recommendation, and involvement in outside activities. But they’ll also go through a process more common in corporate America than academia: a behavior-based interview.
In behavior-based interviewing, students are evaluated for personality traits, skills, and aptitudes common among successful veterinarians such as leadership and the ability to work with and relate to others. They are asked how they would handle certain situations based on experience rather than how they think they might act. “The idea is that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior,” Molgaard says.
The college started conducting such interviews in 2003 after hearing of a disconnect between what employers needed and the type of graduates it was producing. “What we were hearing was what all the health professions schools are hearing from the employers of their grads, whether it’s medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, or veterinary medicine: that your grads really know their stuff, that they’re smart, they come prepared, but they’re lacking some of the people skills. They need to be able to work in teams, to communicate effectively with their patients, clients, and customers,” Molgaard says.
Skills for Success
The idea for using behavior-based interviews grew out of discussions among faculty from a consortium of veterinary schools, including the University of Minnesota’s, that was created to address how they could produce grads who would enjoy and thrive in their careers. The consortium commissioned Minneapolis-based Personnel Decisions International (PDI) to study veterinarians in order to identify the “nontechnical competencies” associated with success, then to help the schools incorporate questions into student interviews that tease out those qualities.
The consultancy interviewed 281 veterinarians from the Midwest and East Coast who worked in large and small animal practices, academia, government, and industry and found that their greatest challenges were understanding the business of veterinary practice, keeping up with scientific knowledge and technical skills, managing people and processes, satisfying customers, and achieving a balance between work and life.
The Vet School Experience
Like medical students, veterinary students spend their first two years entrenched in the basics—anatomy, physiological chemistry, and physiology. They learn about the structure and function of normal, healthy animals, then study the causes of disease and disorders of the organ systems.
Because students are learning to care for birds, camels, llamas, even hedgehogs, in addition to cats, dogs, horses, and cattle, the curriculum is largely based on what’s common to all species. “So we have courses like Cardiopulmonary Disorders and Skin and Adnexa rather than more traditional courses like Small Animal Surgery and Medicine,” says Laura Molgaard, D.V.M., associate dean for academic and student affairs.
Students also spend several half and full days during those years working alongside a preceptor in a veterinary clinic and do two-hour mini rotations in the university’s Veterinary Medical Center.
In their third year, students follow one of five tracks—small animal, equine, mixed animal, food animal, or an interdisciplinary medicine program designed for those who may work for a biomedical device company or in public health, rather than in a traditional practice.
Students spend a month in their third year and their entire fourth year doing 28 two-week rotations.
During their schooling, veterinary students also learn about ethics, human resources issues, how to negotiate a contract, and how to read a profit and loss statement—subjects that aren’t extensively covered in medical school.
After graduation, some do a one-year internship and then a residency at an academic institution or referral practice, where they specialize in areas such as small animal internal medicine or oncology.
However, most go into private practice and work as general practitioners. “And most practices are still relatively small as opposed to the few that are large corporate-owned practices,” Molgaard says.—K.K. |
The PDI team then identified six sets of skills and abilities needed for success in some of those areas: self management (the ability to act autonomously and with confidence), leadership (the ability to direct and motivate others, to act as a coach), critical thinking (the ability to think creatively and use sound judgment), communication (being able to write and speak clearly and to listen carefully), relationship-building (the ability to show care and concern for others), and business skills (understanding what it takes to successfully run a practice).
“Many of those skills are developed much more slowly. They are not something we are going to change in four years,” Molgaard says. “We can teach them how to spay a cat, how to make a diagnosis, but we can’t teach them to use sound judgment or build relationships. That’s the raw material someone comes with.”
Show, Don’t Tell
Mary Robertson McKie is the type of student the vet school wants to attract. With an undergraduate degree in chemistry and a master’s in international agriculture, the third-year student had volunteered at the Humane Society while in graduate school, then worked the front desk of a small animal clinic before applying to veterinary schools.
When she interviewed at the University of Minnesota, McKie recalls being asked about a time when she had to be persuasive. She described enrolling women in a clinical trial of the HPV vaccine. “I talked about how ‘persuade’ wasn’t really the right word but how I was able to communicate the benefits and risks to college students and help them make the decision whether to enroll in the study,” she says. She also was asked to describe a situation she would have handled differently and to tell about a time she had communicated a message in a professional setting. “I do think it gave us a chance to show a more realistic perspective of ourselves,” she says of the behavior-based questions.
Since starting veterinary school, McKie has demonstrated that she does indeed have the preferred qualities. She is one of two members of her class who serves as a liaison between the students, administration, and faculty, and is a member of the student council. McKie also organized an intramural softball team for her class last summer.
In addition to selecting students with characteristics needed for success, Molgaard says faculty are finding ways to develop those competencies within the curriculum. For example, in the Professional Skills course, which is similar to the medical school’s Physician and Society course, students learn about client communications, ethics, conflict management, and teamwork—topics that become real in practice.
Molgaard says it’s too early to tell whether the selection process will produce better veterinarians. The class graduating in the spring of 2008 will be the first to have gone through behavior-based interviews. She says they will soon get some idea of whether the school is on the right track, though. One-third of the grade that fourth-year veterinary students receive for each of their rotations is now based on the competencies identified by PDI.
“We hear a lot of subjective, anecdotal comments,” she says, adding that some professors have noticed the students seem to be more extroverted and ask more questions. “What does that mean? We need to wait until we have data before we can say,” she says. “All it is is hallway talk right now.”—Kim Kiser