The great British veterinary school: Living in the UK for veterinary school

Moving for veterinary school is scary. You are most likely in a new city, state, or country where you know no one, and you’re about to enter a whole new level of learning you likely haven’t experienced before. As someone who was generally never afraid of a little change, I thought it would be easy not only to do this but also to attend veterinary school in the UK.

I had never lived further than a 5-hour drive from home, let alone having to take a transatlantic flight, but I decided that attending the Royal Veterinary College would be the right choice for me. From my interview with staff and talking with other students who had been accepted, I was so excited at the prospect of moving to the UK and experiencing how veterinary school was done there. However, I did not anticipate the differences in veterinary school programs and the difficulty of being so far from home.

One major difference between veterinary school in the UK and the US was the diversity of backgrounds within the program. In the UK, students can attend veterinary school starting at age 18 after completing their A-levels, subject-based qualifications that can lead to university, further study, training, or work.¹ For American Veterinary Medical Association–accredited schools, American students who meet the entry requirements can also attend at 18 years old. They typically must join a standard 5-year program, unlike the 4-year graduate accelerated program I was in. So, there is a very wide range of student ages on campus.

Many English students are working to complete their very first degree and live alone for the first time, but there can also be graduate students in their 30s in the same classes, all with very different backgrounds and world experiences. I have found that this helped me expand my cultural competence. Every day, I work with students who have entirely different circumstances from mine, which will be imperative to my work as a veterinarian, working with clients with different world views from my own and from other doctors in my practice, with experiences different from my own.

Another major adjustment I had was the very different examination style in the UK. Rather than exams every few weeks for each class I was taking, I had 1 exam covering the entire year’s content in my first year. This was challenging, as I really had to use my long-term memory and challenge myself to keep up with content revision over time, rather than just focusing on each topic intensely before an exam and then moving on. I found that it helped me regulate my studying throughout the year and keep myself paced, rather than pulling all-nighters studying before exams as I did in my undergraduate degree. Now that I am into the second year of my degree, I have switched to 1 exam every few months, each covering that term’s content, continuing the theme of large exams covering multiple topics and disciplines.

In the requirements for a veterinary degree in the UK, students are expected to do several placements prior to their clinical education. These placements, for my year, had specific requirements to help students get comfortable with the different farm and companion animal species they would be working with in their clinical years, as well as further support their learning. These placements are the Animal Husbandry Extramural Studies (AHEMS), and mine included traveling to a farm in England to live in the farmhouse for 2 weeks during lambing season. The experience of working hands-on with the sheep (after passing a handling competency exam) and discussing husbandry and management with the farmer helped reinforce my knowledge and truly get comfortable with farm animal species I had never worked with before. I had grown up in a city in the United States, so this became imperative for my knowledge. Now that I am in my clinical years, I am constantly thinking back to AHEMS placements and applying this knowledge to different production animal topics.

In terms of my experience moving so far from home, I was surprised by how homesick I could get. I grew up going to sleep-away summer camps and attended an out-of-state college, so I thought I had the skills to fight off homesickness and easily adjust to new places. However, I found that knowing how difficult and time-consuming it would be to get home if something was wrong or I wasn’t feeling well made the move harder. It was the most difficult during the cold, rainy winters in England.

My saving grace for this was finding my people in veterinary school. I was in the graduate accelerated program, so most of my peers in my cohort were also international students who were just as far from home, if not further. Whenever I was feeling down, I could always send them a text, and we’d immediately have plans to keep ourselves busy, even if it was just to go to our friend’s flat to play with her cats. Finding the right people to support you abroad made the experience so much easier, and I feel as though I have made friends who will last a lifetime. If I were struggling to adjust to the exam schedule or looking for someone to go to AHEMS with, I knew I could lean on them for support and for navigating veterinary school abroad.

Anna Stuart Britt is a third-year veterinary student at Royal Veterinary College.

Reference

1. A levels. Universities and Colleges Admissions Service. Accessed March 3, 2026. https://www.ucas.com/further-education/post-16-qualifications/qualifications-you-can-take/levels