Blog post of the week

This week's topic is "what career path/specialty are you pursuing, and how did you become interested in it?"

I've known for an extremely long time that I wanted to be a veterinarian and from the get-go, I wanted to be an equine practitioner. Over time, and after working in a clinical setting for awhile, I decided that I wanted to be a surgeon. My dad was an anesthesiologist and spent a lot of time in the OR and I grew up hearing all these awesome stories and great surgeries. Not that it's realistic at all, but watching television shows about veterinary medicine or human medicine always had me drawn to the surgeons in the show as well. 
After awhile, however, I realized that equine surgeons weren't generally able to do a lot of surgery. This is a gross generalization, I realize, but I took several factors into consideration when coming to this conclusion. I want to return to Orlando, Florida to practice or at bare minimum, I want to be in Florida. The places where I could be useful as a DACVS for equine surgery are limited and located in places I don't necessarily want to live. Equine practitioners are one of the worst paid focuses at the moment, which doesn't jive so well with the massive loans that vet school requires. Also, I decided I really liked orthopedic and soft tissue surgery, and in this current economy, unless I work for someone with a lot of money, I won't get to do a lot of surgery because it's often much cheaper and easier to euthanize. Sad, but true.
So, I decided that I would turn my attentions to small animal medicine. I've spoken to a couple professors and gotten opinions and gathered information on just what it would take. I want to end up doing an internship and residency in an academic setting (University of Florida would be my only option in Florida) and then get a job in a private practice near where my parents live in Florida. There's a couple small animal specialty clinics around their area, so hopefully I could snag a spot there.
Recently, I've become more interested in ophthalmology, but as my focus has been on ACVS for so long, I'm not sure what ophthalmology would require -- also there's the fact that I still want to do a lot of surgery! I know we used to refer out a lot for cataract surgery and sometimes we'd perform enucleations, sometimes we'd refer them out... So, I'm looking into that now, since our first case of block 3 was all about eyes and I fell in love.