Thomas E. Catanzaro, DVM, MHA, FACHE, DACHE

You have graduated; you passed the boards, and you have finally found a practice that is a great fit. The owner is excited about having you start your career at the practice, too. Now you must walk through the door of that practice and make your first impression as a new team member.

It's great to see many practices are now acknowledging that the old, traditional methods of management are not effective, and they are modernizing their strategies and taking steps to improve staff morale, and consequently productivity.

New graduates do not have the privilege of "dating" practices. This a one reason why so few stay with their first practices.

The usual encounter starts with a progress-notes entry for the client concern, a weight (hopefully sequential with a body-condition score), a TPR, a BP, lead II ECG, tonopen screen and maybe even a urinary kidney screen.

One of the most often-used consultation summaries, in my experience, comes from the comments on creating our own day.

In preparing this article, my mind races back to my days as a veterinary student at Colorado State University. One of the more vivid memories I recall involved my surgery partner. He was performing a femoral head resection. The stockinette leg slips up his arm, and he grabs it with his lower jaw and shoulder just as the surgery professor walks up.