A novel career development course for animal science students pursuing veterinary college admissions

A one-credit hour, elective, professional development course was created at North Carolina State University to introduce pre-veterinary track students to the admissions process and the breadth of the veterinary profession. The course was designed to facilitate career exploration while building self-efficacy through vicarious learning, interacting with speakers in various veterinary subfields, and addressing misperceptions about veterinary admissions. To evaluate the student learning objectives and improve upon the current practices of the course, data from two pretest and posttest course surveys for 235 course participants between Spring 2014 and 2017 were analyzed. The results of the study showed that students experienced significant gains in self-appraisal (Cohen’s d ranged 1.88 to 2.53), gathering occupational information (Cohen’s d ranged 1.59 to 2.53), goal selection (Cohen’s d ranged 2.14 to 2.53), and planning and problem-solving (Cohen’s d ranged 1.88 to 2.77) as well as experienced a decrease in five misperceptions about veterinary admissions. This novel course is presented as a prospective course for other universities.