Baker shares insights on Auburn VetMed experience on podcast
For Walter Baker, veterinary medicine isn’t merely a career. It’s a calling shaped by curiosity, compassion, and a desire to help animals.
“I’ve had a pretty strong conviction to be a veterinarian since about seventh grade,” Baker, a second-year Auburn DVM student, recalled on a recent episode of the VIN Foundation: Veterinary Pulse podcast.
Baker recently spoke to VIN Foundation Executive Director Jordan Benshea about what he learned during his first year in the college’s DVM program and what advice he would offer to new veterinary students. Baker, who earned a bachelor’s degree in animal sciences from the University of Kentucky, was one of two recipients of the inaugural Mike Dunn, DVM Veterinary Student Scholarship created by Becky Godchaux.
After earning his DVM, Baker plans to return to Kentucky to practice general mixed animal medicine.
Baker said that navigating the first year of Auburn’s DVM program, while challenging, was helped by the collegiality within his cohort.
“There’s 131 one of us and it’s not cliquey. We’re liable to go play pickleball and there will be a fifth of our entire class on the pickleball courts. Or we’ll go out to food trucks on a Friday night and there’s another group of people going. We all get together and we all have a good time.”
When he’s not studying or working at a clinic owned by an Auburn DVM alum, Baker tends to a small farm, goes fishing, reads and engages in bird watching. He said he notices a significant difference between how he approaches his studies in his second year as opposed to his first.
“Any new chapter in your life, there’s anxiety correlated with it because it’s unknown,” he said. “Now I know the campus. It’s a smaller community than undergrad. I know the professors, I know the people in my cohort and the cohort ahead of me. I have more of an understanding of how everything operates. Having that understanding really takes away a lot of the anxiety.”
Perhaps the most significant change involved modifying study habits acquired during his undergraduate years in order to adapt to more complex course material.
“You have to learn a completely new way of studying compared to undergrad,” Baker said. “When I started, I would rewrite every lecture for every exam and that was taking just a silly amount of time. I’d study 20 hours rewriting lecture material for each exam. Now I lean more toward just annotating the slide decks and rewriting the main big picture things. That’s really helped me expedite the learning experience and my ability to retain [course material].”