Navigating veterinary school and overcoming barriers

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On this week's episode of The Vet Blast Podcast presented by dvm360, our host Adam Christman, DVM, MBA, welcomes Ashely Lall, a second-year veterinary student and a dvm360 student ambassador, to discuss how her pet bird inspired her to switch from human medicine to veterinary medicine, what it is like being hearing-impaired, and more.

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Below is a partial transcript:

Adam Christman, DVM, MBA: We were talking earlier [and] I teased it out a little bit about barriers. We've all experienced some sort of, whatever it could be, types of barriers, either physical, emotional, [or], learning barriers. Tell the listeners a little bit about what your experience is like...with what you're going through in vet school and in life in general.

Ashley Lall: Well, one of the things I haven't mentioned [is] that I was actually born hearing impaired, so I was born with mild to moderate hearing loss in both ears, and that affected my life quite a bit. You know... not being able to hear [as] well as my peers. And you know, even when I was in human med, and now even in animal med, I'm always scared that I'm going to miss something, especially when it comes [to], you know, auscultation and stuff like that. But I do have technology on my side. I do have an echo stethoscope that helps me with the amplification of those sounds and stuff. And then I also have a very supportive school. They provided me with caption ed, which is a captioning program that will turn real-time talk into words that I can see on a screen. I have professors that are willing to wear my mic that connects straight to my hearing aids. And I'm actually a bit nervous when it comes to actually getting out there into the world of veterinary med as a doctor, just because I don't know what my support staff is going to be like, just because how, how am I supposed to navigate that world of very fast paced, very life-or-death decisions, and you know, what if I missed something, and it's a big worry of mine, but I'm trying to...get through that, and, you know, realize that [my] support staff and other colleagues and everything will always do their best to help me.