I’d say improve your diagnostic skills, your surgical skills, possibly not in a zoo, but you know, in a small animal internship, a large animal internship, get those skill sets down, unless you’ve gotten great skill sets out of vet school, and I think vet schools now that are making kids into clinicians and putting ’em in clinic, and doing all that stuff may not be doing them as service. They may need more time from some of the basic sciences, and the physiology and stuff like that, ’cause you can learn your clinical stuff when you get into an internship. I mean I learned more about clinical medicine my first month and a half or two months in my internship than I would’ve learned through vet school going through, you know, a year or so of clinics and surgery, because it was so intense and I had such good mentors there. So I would say get your diagnostic skills up by making yourself more marketable, don’t maybe go down the straight clinical path, ’cause the clinical path may dry up, you know, but maybe if you’re still interested in clinics, you can be a clinician and do other things too. I don’t know, and don’t forget what other people have done in the past, you know, don’t be caught doing the same study somebody’s done 10 years ago and trying to publish it as new information. That kind of ticks me off. I’m halfway tempted in some of our meetings, where people get up and give papers to say, “You haven’t read the literature, why don’t you, somebody did that six years ago. You’re repeating what somebody did.” But I don’t feel like being the old guy in the back of the room with a little bit of a potbelly, balding and probably had a beer for lunch sitting up and having, telling somebody like that, they’re gonna say, “Oh, damn Bush, he’s just back there sounding off to hear himself talk.” But realistically, I’ve talked about it to some of my former interns and residents, and we all agree that, you know, that has to be said sometime.
