Being a Veterinary Technician is Incredibly Rewarding

For Lorelei D’Avolio, LVT, VTS (Exotics), CVPM, practice manager at The Center for Avian and Exotic Medicine in New York, being a veterinary technician is incredibly rewarding. Particulalry, D’Avolio loves having contact with her patients and seeing them through every step of their care.

"Being a technician for me has been incredibly rewarding. I love having the contact with the animals in a very different way then I think the veterinarians do. I think being a veterinarian would be great as well, but it's just a very different thing. I enjoy having the tactile contact with the animals. I love seeing the cases through from beginning to end, the nursing of them, giving them everything I've got to make sure that they're OK while they are with us. And I also really enjoy the client aspect of it—I love getting to know the people and getting to know the relationship and the bond that they have with their animal. So, that is all incredibly rewarding for me as a technician.

The challenges that I find are the same things technicians always complain about. Financially it can be really challenging, it's often hard to feel like you don't have a lot of upward mobility when you're a technician, where do you go from here? One of the things I now, in my current career, really enjoy is encouraging technicians and showing them that there is a lot more you can do, it's not just restraining and tube feeding animals—you actually can advance your career depending on what you want to do. And there really are so many options and opportunities for technicians, so I hope to teach and encourage that so people don't feel they have to leave the profession, they can just build new things for themselves to do within it."