Update from the Education and Licensure Committee

Within the Student AVMA House of Delegates there are many committees made up of your student delegates. These committees work hard to create scholarships, grants and other contests that are available to you as a SAVMA member or a club or group at your school. This is free money that they want to give away! To check out the opportunities available to you through these committees, head over to:http://www.avma.org/savma/committee.asp#license

Back in the fall the Education and Licensure Committee picked two recipients for their Extracurricular Funding Grant. The purpose of this grant is to provide veterinary student organizations funding for wet labs or lectures supplementing their college's curriculum. These grants typically are awarded to help fund programs that veterinary students would not normally be exposed to in their traditional courses. The winners for the 2009-2010 school year were an equine acupuncture wet lab held at University of Pennsylvania and the Marine Mammal Conference at University of Wisconsin. You can read more about the Marine Mammal Conference below.

The Wildlife Exotic and Zoo Animal Medicine (WEZAM) Club of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine hosted its third annual Marine Mammal Conference (MMC) on November 7^th and 8^th, 2009.  The MMC broadened the horizons of students and veterinarians with a series of lectures given by marine mammal health professionals brought inland to Wisconsin, where there is plenty of interest but few flippered patients.  This year, the MMC was fortunate to play host to nine veterinarians, each with extensive experience in marine mammal clinical medicine, research, or both.

The Marine Mammal Conference was open to all veterinarians, and Continuing Education credit was available to them, but the primary focus of the MMC was on the student.  A typical veterinary school’s curriculum covers domestic animal medicine exhaustively, but students with interests beyond the domestic species must look for opportunities like the MMC in order to explore those interests. In addition to this unique education, the MMC also provided an opportunity for students to get to know the marine mammal vets at the reception dinner and Q&A sessions.  These conversations proved to be a great source of ideas and connections for summer internships, 4^th year externships, and potential career paths.