From internship to entrepreneurship

Life can sometimes not turn out the way it is planned. When Greg Echols, DVM, was in veterinary school he had no idea that his plans would be derailed once COVID-19 hit the United States and shut down his clinical rotations, classes, and overall just being with others. The shut down led him to begin making content on social media since TikTok was just becoming popular, and now he uses his accounts to educate pet parents in a way that is humorous, but also conveys important information.

On this week's episode of The Vet Blast Podcast, our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, sat down with Echols, to chat about his experiences with internships in veterinary medicine and how he became a relief veterinarian, his rise to fame on social media, and lessons he learned from bodybuilding and powerlifting that he thinks are just as valuable for veterinary professionals.

Below is a partial transcript

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: Tell us a little bit about your journey, because you come from vet school, and then where you are today, where you have your relief services, Greg Echol's relief services in July 2023, so what did that look like? Because I know you did an internship, so tell, tell the listeners a little about that.

Greg Echols, DVM: After vet school, had a very huge passion for dermatology, and so I was considering going ahead and doing an internship at that point to lead me into residency for dermatology. But also I was doing an internship because I was still super scared of Emergency Medicine. I was great with [general practice]. I did, I was a vet assistant for 7 and a half years for vet school, and it was all GP that I did there. So I was pretty comfortable talking with clients, going over estimates, handling restraint, you know, just client communication, I was great there, but anything emergent that came in, where, if you have 1 or 2, potentially 3 things coming in at the same time, trying to figure out how to handle those gave me severe anxiety. So that was one of the big reasons I did rotate an internship was to get more hands on an emergency but I didn't want to do just a strict emergency rotating internship, because I didn't see myself being an emergency veterinarian.

I felt like that year was very, I would say it's probably kind of harder than 4th year in vet school, it was very brutal, but I feel like it taught me a whole lot. The GP aspect. I still saw appointments, still saw clients. The great thing about where I was is they would schedule appointments that you like more as far as a specialty went. So if you were more like dermatology and skin, most of your appointments were catered towards that, but you still got your internal medicine, cardiac orthopedic exams too, as well thrown in. But those are great things. I had a lot of dermatology cases that will help me build up if I was still planning to pursue dermatology, but then on the emergency side, it just made me well more equipped.