The veterinary medicine degree programme: degree and job prospects
Students who choose to attend the degree programme in veterinary medicine will have, at the end of their studies, the theoretical and practical knowledge to grant them access to one of the world’s most beautiful and beloved professions: the veterinarian.
For many students, the choice of this degree programme comes from a love for animals. As a consequence, the most known and loved professional profile is that of a veterinarian engaged in the treatment of animal diseases and illnesses. Alongside this figure, which is still the most common role for veterinary medicine graduates, it is important to know that there are other less-familiar but still important and fascinating professional opportunities.
An example? Food safety: in this area veterinarians work to guarantee human health by ensuring the safety of food of animal origin such as milk, cheese, eggs, meat and fish products.
In addition, love for animals is not enough to make a good veterinarian alone. One often-overlooked aspect is the need to empathise with an animal’s pain in situations of intense emotional impact that not everyone can tolerate. Students that want to attend veterinary medicine programme should adequately reflect and consider these implications as they make their decision.
There are a lot of good reasons, but this isn’t the place to list them all.
Let's start with the most important one: the veterinary medicine programme at the University of Bologna is accredited by EAEVE. EAEVE is a European organization that evaluates, on the basis of very strict criteria, the quality of European degree programmes. The Department of Veterinary Medical Sciences and its degree programme is one of the 11 accredited facilities in Europe, out of over a hundred...and the only one in Italy!
EAEVE accreditation is important for students: it shows that the programme has the right team of professors, facilities, laboratories and clinical cases needed to train good veterinarians...and that everything is carried out according to strict quality assurance criteria.
The veterinary medicine programme is not in the centre of Bologna, but in Ozzano, in a structure that closely reflects the campus model of foreign universities. This makes the presence of adequate facilities possible, for example those for animal housing.
In Ozzano, teachers and students share many activities and the campus is inhabited and "lived" from morning to night. The veterinary medicine programme must be attended and experienced in person, because there are a lot of practical activities on animals that, obviously, cannot be learned remotely. The students have adequate facilities (including study rooms, a cafe, computer lab) and wireless coverage that covers the entire area.
Finally, in Ozzano there is an experimental dairy farm and a veterinary teaching hospital open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day which is considered one of Italy’s best structures for clinical cases and equipment. Could there be a better place to become a veterinarian?
Prof. Gualtiero Gandini