Elevate Your Career Planning: Exploring Pathways and Navigating Growth at Every Stage

On Demand available Virtual

On Demand Available

Course Overview

Many veterinary professionals reach a point of asking what’s next in their careers or how to find greater satisfaction in their current roles yet may not know where to begin. This complimentary course is designed to help you reflect on what fulfills you, explore diverse career paths across specialty and academic practice, and gain insights to guide your next steps, whether you’re just starting out or seeking renewed purpose. Through engaging panel discussions and reflective prompts, you’ll hear firsthand experiences from colleagues who have navigated different professional journeys and discover practical ways to align your passions, priorities, and long-term goals.

Each session features content from top-rated ACVIM Forum presentations and expert panels, enhanced with reflective elements that help you apply key insights to your own career goals. In alignment with the ACVIM’s mission, vision, and values, this new complimentary offering provides timely, relevant guidance to help veterinary professionals build meaningful, sustainable careers at every stage of their journey.

Sessions included in this offering are:

Am I Doing What I Want to Be Doing Right Now? Private Practice, Locum and Academia
Panel: Learning to Leading: Insights and Strategies for Career Transition
A Panel on Getting Ready for Academia: Tips, Hints and Lessons Learned for the Transition to Junior Faculty and Academic Contract Negotiation
Why Internal Medicine is Great Preparation for Leadership

Back to the Course Catalog

Jump to:

Who Should Attend

ACVIM Diplomates and Candidates
European Diplomates and Candidates
Affiliate Diplomates and Candidates
Veterinarians
Veterinary Technicians
Veterinary Assistants
Students
Allied Professionals

Agenda

Am I Doing What I Want to Be Doing Right Now? Private Practice, Locum and Academia

Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75 minutes

Session Description: Mid-career veterinarians can often feel stale and lack enthusiasm when facing another long day of appointments. You begin to wonder if specialty medicine is as stimulating as you hoped when you are discussing epilepsy, Cushing's disease, lymphoma, or whatever has become the "vaccine and heartworm preventative talk" for your specialty. This is when we begin to think "Am I doing what I want to be doing right now?" Most veterinary specialists consider private practice the only practical career choice. Rewarding salaries and a fast pace are alluring, but the long hours and constant struggle to make production goals can be exhausting. Options considered by specialists are either industry, academia, or permanent locum work. These are all possibilities, but academia carries a unique set of challenges and rewards. Private practice allows a clinician to maximize financial production, foster strong bonds with owners and their pets, and offer shorter workweeks. Academic challenges include a lower salary, but most Universities offer enhanced benefits. The rewards of working in a teaching hospital include access to innovative care, student teaching, and mentoring residents. Supporting house officers and being on call can add to the workload, but time off clinics can foster intellectual development and professional recognition. Exploration of these topics can offer a renewed sense of purpose to veterinary specialists.

Panel: Learning to Leading: Insights and Strategies for Career Transition

Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75 minutes

Session Description: It is a shared experience across all specialty areas in veterinary medicine that each diplomate will make the transition from resident trainee to an independent board-certified specialist, for both private practice and academic positions. This transition comes with inherent challenges, such as providing excellent patient care while adapting to a new hospital, establishing boundaries, learning new skill sets, and in some cases, starting a service as a new specialist alone. The goal of this session is to discuss challenges and opportunities associated with this transition, and to understand how to best set trainees up for success with finding long-term personal and professional satisfaction in their careers. Our discussion may shape how we train future ACVIM residents.

A Panel on Getting Ready for Academia: Tips, Hints and Lessons Learned for the Transition to Junior Faculty and Academic Contract Negotiation

Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75 minutes

Session Description: Currently, there is a shortage of specialists in academia with a significant attrition of specialists in academia after their first academic position. Contract negotiation can help set faculty up for success and improved job satisfaction but is not something that all residents receive mentorship and instruction regarding. Within this panel, our objective is to discuss aspects of contract negotiation, advice for negotiating a successful contract for the individual and how candidates can acquire valuable information to help them make informed negotiations. This panel consists of four large animal internal medicine diplomats with varied experience (early career tenure track, early career clinical track, established career department chair, established career former hospital director) and from different institutions.

Why Internal Medicine is Great Preparation for Leadership

Recording Duration: 50 minutes
Interactive Course Duration: Approximately 75 minutes

Session Description: There are so many internists in administration that it is worth considering why internal medicine is fertile ground for developing leaders and why the skills used to become a successful internist are transferable to administration. Perhaps this is the ability to consider multiple perspectives as differential diagnosis lists are developed, the team-based approach to internal medicine, the patience required to wait for medical treatments to take effect, or the just the knowledge that like some of the diseases we treat, there are problems in administration that are complex and near impossible to resolve. In this panel discussion, we will consider this question and hear from internists who have taken on different leadership roles. We will also discuss leadership development and how residents, internists, and practitioners can start developing the skills needed to assume leadership roles in veterinary colleges, practices, or professional organizations like the ACVIM.

Meet the Instructors

Carrie Wood, DVM, DACVIM (Oncology)

Carrie Wood is an assistant professor in Clinical Oncology at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University. She received her DVM from Kansas State University and has practiced in a variety of settings including academia, small private, and corporate veterinary practices. She currently serves as section head for the oncology program and is active in the ACVIM and Veterinary Cancer Society.

Sarah Schmid, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM)

Dr. Sarah Schmid is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee College of Veterinary Medicine. Her interests include gastroenterology, protein-losing disease, and education.

Emily Gould, DVM, MS, PhD, DACVIM (SAIM)

Dr. Emily Gould is a board-certified internist who is currently an assistant professor of internal medicine in the Gastrointestinal Lab at Texas A&M University. Emily is passionate about the education and teaching of students, interns, and medical residents, and has an interest in mental health wellbeing in veterinary medicine. She is actively involved in the house officer Wellbeing Committee at A&M, whose mission is to promote support and systems based mental health initiatives for small animal intern and resident trainees.

Elizabeth Golly, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM)

Chad Johannes, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM, Oncology)

Chad M. Johannes, DVM, DACVIM (SAIM, Oncology) is an Associate Professor and Executive Director of Clinical Services at Colorado State University. Dr. Johannes joined CSU in 2022 after 7 years working to develop the oncology program at Iowa State University. His industry experience includes former Medical Director at Aratana Therapeutics and coordination of the launch of Palladia® during his time with Zoetis. Dr. Johannes’s practice experience includes primary care, specialty care and academic settings. His areas of research interest include oncology therapeutic development and market introduction and effective management of treatment-related side effects.

Jamie Kopper, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (LAIM)

Dr. Jamie Kopper is an assistant professor in equine medicine and emergency/critical care at Iowa State University. Her research interests include improving survival of horses with gastrointestinal disease and improving survival of critically ill large animal patients.

Debra Sellon, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (LAIM)

David Wong, DVM, MS, DACVIM (LAIM)

David Wong: Professor, Iowa State University, BS and DVM- Michigan State University
ACVIM Residency - Virginia Tech
ACVECC Residency - ISU/U PennCurrently Professor and Dept Chair of Equine Medicine at Iowa State University

Nicholas Frank, DVM, PhD, DACVIM

Dr. Frank grew up in the United Kingdom. He received his BSc. Honors degree in Biology from the University of North Carolina in 1989 and his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree from Purdue University in 1993. He was in private practice for two years and then returned to Purdue University for his residency and PhD. In 2002, he went to the University of Tennessee. In 2011, Dr. Frank moved to Tufts University to become Chair of the Department of Clinical Sciences, and in 2017, he became Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. In 2023, he became the Dean of the Mississippi State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

Amanda House, DVM, DACVIM (LAIM)

Dr. House is the Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs and serves as a clinical professor in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences at the University of Florida CVM. She completed her Bachelor of Science in animal science from Cornell University. After graduating from Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine in 2001, Dr. House completed an internship and large animal internal medicine residency at the University of Georgia’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital. Dr. House became board certified in large animal internal medicine in 2005.

Chris Sanchez, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (LAIM)

Chris Sanchez is Associate Dean for Clinical Services-Large Animal Operations at the University of Florida and a former Specialty President of large animal internal medicine for ACVIM.

Catharine Scott-Moncrieff, Vet MB, MA, MS, DACVIM (SAIM), DECVIM-CA

Catharine Scott-Moncrieff graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1985. In 1989 she joined the faculty of Purdue University, where she is Professor of small animal internal medicine. She is a Diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (small animal), and the European College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (companion animal). Her research and clinical interests are canine and feline endocrinology. She is an author of more than 70 peer reviewed publications in small animal endocrinology and internal medicine.