Doing an internship at a vet surgery?

[DuchessMinnie]

MIL is French and has asked me to help to find a 6 week unpaid internship for a friend's daughter who is in her 3rd year of studying veterinary medicine at uni. Does anyone know if this would be possible and how to go about it other than sending her CV to our local vet surgery, which I've already done? Very grateful for any thoughts.

[maxelly]

Does her university/veterinary school not offer any help/guidance on how to go about securing the 'internship', also what does the internship need to involve - i.e. is any work in any practice OK or does she need/want large animal or small animal experience, also if she spends 6 weeks sitting behind reception or cleaning out cages is that enough or does she need a certain level of clinical exposure - doing actual consultations/procedures herself or observing the vets do them? Obviously the latter is a lot more work and less benefit to the practice than having an unpaid helper, but don't underestimate how much effort has to go into having any kind of work experience or placement student around, someone usually has to be assigned to look after them every day, explain what is going on to them etc.

I think the best approach would be to prepare a good email/letter which explains in detail what she wants/needs from the placement and what she can offer (not just a CV as realistically how much useful work experience does a young student have, although by all means attach it), and then send it out to as many practices as possible, as I would expect quite a few to say no, they must get a lot of requests for this kind of thing although probably more from prospective rather than existing vet. med. students. The larger chain practices probably have formal schemes she can apply to e.g. medivet www.medivet.co.uk/careers/extra-mural-studies/

But really, why is this your/your MIL/the Mum's job when none of you are vets? Surely at the daughter's age (21+?) she should be sorting this out for herself, she's hardly a helpless early teen who needs her work experience organised for her?

[DuchessMinnie]

@maxelly thank you! And that is a very good question. My MIL has texted me several times to chase as well. I know zero about vets except when I take my own animals in.

I did suspect it would be a big ask, the girl's mum appears to think that because we live in England it's easy for us to arrange. thank you for replying, I appreciate it.

[SaorsaSolasta]

The daughter really should be contacting practices herself to ask. Practices are usually very used to taking vet students so they should be familiar with the whole process. 6 weeks is a long time for a third year student though so the practice might not want a student for that long. She needs to phone or email practices she is interested in and arrange dates with them - practices will be expecting her to be arranging it herself. A CV isn't usually required, UK vet students usually just phone/email practices they're interested in. I'm not sure how the vet schools work in France though.

[DuchessMinnie]

@SaorsaSolasta thank you too :)