Essays

Personal Essay

In this section, use your own words to create a brief personal essay that includes responses to the question below:

Discuss briefly the development of your interest in veterinary medicine. Discuss those unique activities that have contributed to your preparation for a professional program. Discuss your understanding of the veterinary medical profession, what you have to offer the profession to it and your career goals and objectives.

  • You have 4500 characters (including spaces and carriage returns) to answer the prompt.
  • For your Personal Essay, we recommend using a word processing program and then copying and pasting your statement into the text box.
  • As the character count can vary depending on your Word Processing program, please refer to the character count provided on the application.

FORMATTING: The VMCAS text box standardizes text formatting. Special characters such as bullets, bold text, italics, underlining, spacing, and indenting will NOT be retained from programs such as Microsoft Word. VMCAS highly recommends using a text editor (such as Notepad or TextEdit) to adjust the spacing in your essay. 

Explanation Statement

While this section is NOT REQUIRED, you can use it to record information that could not be listed anywhere else within the web application, such as missing parental information, and disciplinary action(s) which require detailed explanation. This section can also be used to provide the admissions committee(s) additional information that you consider vital to your application. Your explanation statement should be clearly and succinctly written – 2000 characters (including spaces) have been allotted for this purpose.

Examples of pertinent information might include explanations about interruptions in your studies or experiences, unique circumstances you have faced, or reasons for decisions you have made.

DO NOT use this section for spillover for a personal statement which exceeds the character limit.

PROOFREADING AND E-SUBMITTING

Please be sure to look over your essays several times for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other errors BEFORE you e-submit your application. Once you e-submit your application, you CANNOT re-enter, update, or otherwise edit your essay or explanation statement and VMCAS staff CANNOT do so for you.

If you find an error after you submit and you believe it is major enough to effect the consideration of your application, we advise contacting your designated programs to determine whether they will accept a corrected copy sent directly to them.