Where? On Crosscurrents, an award-winning daily news program on 91.7 FM, KALW
When? Monday, June 13th, between 5-5:30 pm*
This is the second installment in a three-part series exploring the experiences of San Francisco Bay Area Recession Grads. Marica Patchett graduated in 2009 with a degree in veterinary medicine from U.C. Davis.
Here's some of the story that was left on the cutting room floor (as a teaser, of sorts):
Before Marica pursued vet school, she was a self-described lab rat...
At the time I was working for the USDA and we were doing an aging study on these particular species of fly and I would take up these dried up little flies from the desiccator and I would chop their heads off, grind them up, on ice, in the dark, using a variety of chemicals, and then inject my little solution into a machine and I would wait 7 minutes for it to spit out the results --and then I would do it again.
Over and over and over again. I started to feel like I was going a little bit crazy, because it was just so repetitious and it was just, it was boring. It was really starting to affect me.
I had most of the requirements ready to go into vet school, I just had a couple classes that I needed to take, but the big hurdle was that I'd never worked in a veterinary clinic before. I didn't have any actual animal handling experience. Aside from handling insects, which didn't really count.
I had to start at the bottom and I got a job scooping poop at the local humane society. And so here I was, I had this degree in molecular biology and I was scooping poop and walkin' dogs. But that was the only way to start and get my foot in the door in order to become a technician and to log some veterinary hours, in order to even be considered for application for vet school. So that's sort of where it started.
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