Thank you for your interest in our externship program. We encourage students to visit Wheat Ridge, when possible, to give us a chance to meet you and also for you to have a chance to fully evaluate our work environment and speak first hand with our clinicians, current interns and staff.
General Information
Wheat Ridge Animal Hospital is a busy hospital with three practices under one roof: a general practice, a specialty referral practice and a 24/7 emergency/critical care practice. These three practices work together to manage our large and varied caseload. There are 30+ staff doctors currently employed here including specialists in internal medicine, surgery, emergency and critical care, oncology, neurology, cardiology, anesthesia, ophthalmology, diagnostic imaging, sports medicine & rehabilitation, dermatology, and theriogenology. We also have highly talented and experienced emergency and general practice doctors on staff.
For the coming year, we will have:
- 14 rotating interns that have matched through VIRM.
- Specialty interns in surgery, neurology, and emergency and critical care.
Our hospital has a total staff of over 200 individuals, including over 100 certified veterinary technicians. Wheat Ridge’s general practice was established in 1955 and became AAHA accredited in 1961. In 2017, we moved into a new building that is a 32,000 square foot state of the art facility. We see approximately 40,000 cases per year and average 20 hospitalized cases and 12 surgeries daily. To help provide the best care for our patients, our facility has a separate entrance and waiting room for emergency clients, 27 exam rooms, a 64 slice CT scanner, MRI, seven surgical suites, C-arm, two digital radiology suites, ultrasound and endoscopy suites. It also includes a dedicated intensive care unit, large dental suite, blood bank, complete in-house reference laboratory with clinical pathologist on site, physical therapy suite, and a large conference room with a veterinary library and online access to a variety of journals.
Veterinary Student Externships
We encourage students to visit Wheat Ridge, when possible, to give us a chance to meet you and also for you to have a chance to fully evaluate our work environment and speak first hand with our clinicians, current interns and staff. However, we understand, with costs and busy fourth-year schedules, that a visit is not possible for everyone, and we will provide interviews for internship during the match process in December and January as well.
- Student externs may visit for as short one day or up to two weeks at a time.
- Graded externships are possible with advance notification and submission of all required paperwork from your school.
- Our rotating externship is more observational than hands on – students actively participate in daily hospital rounds, case discussions, outpatient receiving, case management, diagnostics and client communications, but students do not perform surgery, receive patients primarily or have responsibility for treatments on their own.
- Our externships are focused on one individual specialty service and are awarded on a first come-first served basis. This allows for more in-depth interactions and teaching for the externs. However, we expect there to be ample down-time to allow brief visits with other services in the hospital. When you apply, please indicate on your externship application what specialty you would prefer to work with as well as dates you are available.
Your Application
We have resources on-site which allow students to delve into the literature, to answer questions that arise during their visit and to bring this new information to us at subsequent rounds sessions.
- We limit the number of externs visiting at one time to allow a good experience for all.
- We accept students on a first come, first served basis, so please submit your application for externship as early as possible.
- We only accept applicants in their final clinical year of study and who are in the top 50% of their class.
- If you are a first, second or third year student, not yet in your clinical year, please consider applying in the future.
If you would like to apply for Wheat Ridge’s vet student externship, please fill out the application and return this with your CV to the Extern Coordinator at [email protected].
Please include dates that you are available and the specialty you would like to work with. There are no costs or fees charged and no stipend is provided. We neither require nor provide insurance (liability, health or workman’s compensations) for visiting students; students are required to provide these should your college require them.