Student Engagement
What is Student Engagement at UAF Vet Med?
Student engagement is our initiative to connect students with the veterinary community, not only within Alaska, but around the world. The veterinary community is small and close knit. We hope to help students integrate into that community early in their careers and teach them the value of engagement with peers, colleagues, and collaborators.
How to engage with UAF Vet Med students
Engagement can occur in a variety of ways including participating in mentoring, Lunch-N-Learn presentations, externships with veterinarians, or employment. Please read below for more information.
Mentoring
Our first & second-year veterinary students are required to participate in a mentoring program as part of their Foundations of Veterinary Medicine class every semester. This program involves the student identifying a mentor with shared interests, establishing goals of a mentorship relationship, and spending a few hours working on those goals each semester. These goals can range from learning clinical skills such as physical exams, how to become a good communicator, work/life balance, how to survive vet school, learning about practice management, research, public health, etc. The goals are entirely up to what both the mentee and mentor feel would be most beneficial. Students are encouraged to find the best mentor fit for them. Given our remote location, mentoring can be face-to-face or virtual, which means a mentor can be located anywhere in the world.
Students are required to have at least one mentor but may have more than one. We provide students with a list of potential mentors including who and where they are, what their interests are, and contact information to help them find the perfect fit.
If you are interested in mentoring a UAF veterinary student, please complete our Student Engagement Interest form below.
Lunch-N-Learn
We encourage our students to seek opportunities to learn about veterinary medicine outside of what they are learning in the classroom. One way for them to do this is to hear from members of the veterinary community over lunch. Lunch-N-Learn topics range from veterinarians talking about their career paths to introductions to clinics and hospitals, Professional Service Veterinarians, veterinary researchers, public health veterinarians, and more. We even get annual visits from Yogi, UAF Police Department's explosive detection K-9 unit.
Lunch-N-Learns can be either in person or virtual, as our classroom space is designed for interactive virtual sessions.
If you are interested in providing a Lunch-N-Learn, please complete our Student Engagement Interest form below.
Externships
A medical externship is a short-term, hands-on experience where students shadow professionals in a medical setting to gain real-world experience and insight into their chosen field. While our students get opportunities for Clinical Rotation Externships during their 4th year at CSU in Ft. Collins, CO, we encourage them to seek out additional opportunities earlier in their career.
We have developed an elective course, Professional Explorations Externship, to give UAF veterinary students a chance during their first and second year of school to "explore" an area of interest. The goal of this externship is to learn more about a specific area of interest before committing to third and fourth year electives or rotations.
Professional Explorations Externship works as follows:
- Students interested in this externship are matched to a mentor with their same interests
- A plan, including goals and responsibilities, is developed
- The student spends 40+ hours working with their mentor to achieve those goals.
- The student writes a short (2-4 page) paper about their externship and does a 15-minute presentation to the class
These externships can be in any area of veterinary medicine from clinical, to research, regulatory, public health, and beyond. We encourage students to be creative with their interests and engage the concept of exploration.
If you would like to become a potential mentor for a student externship, please complete our Student Engagement Interest form below.
Employment
Many students work during their veterinary career both as a source of revenue and a chance to gain experience. Several students have come back to work as veterinarians at practices they worked at during their education at UAF.
If you are interested in hiring veterinary students to work in your practice, research lab, etc. please complete the Student Engagement Interest form below.
