Q&A with a keynote: Walter Brown, RVTg, VTS, ECC

Walter Brown, RVTg, VTS, ECC, believes that his first love was veterinary medicine. After growing up around animals, Brown expressed a passion for veterinary medicine, which his mother encouraged. However, after entering a rebellious phase in his life he put veterinary medicine on the back burner to pursue a different career. Once he rediscovered his love for veterinary medicine and learned about the different career opportunities, Brown began his career as a veterinary technician.

To learn more about Brown, the future of his career, and his upcoming keynote address, check out his Q&A style interview with dvm360^®.

What inspired you to become a technician?

The biggest thing that inspired me to become a veterinary technician is at a young age being surrounded by so many animals. My grandmother lived on a large property and she would have a number of different hunting dogs in the area that would be dropped off to our house. She had a ton of cats, chickens, cows, and just being there as a kid and being around these different animals, I think is what grew my love for veterinary medicine. Like all kids, I want to be a veterinarian and my mother really pushed me hard to be a veterinarian and as a kid, right, being pushed by your mom, what's the next thing you do? Rebel.

I was in [my college] band [and] I was in the movie Drum Line. During that process, [my college] lost their accreditation so I had to follow my second love, which again, was always my first love. I was just a rebellious person as a teenager. Going into veterinary medicine, I learned that there were different avenues of veterinary medicine and what sparked my interest the most was Veterinary Technology, and I followed that career path up until college where I had an opportunity to become a veterinary technician or go to veterinary school and I chose to be a veterinary technician.

What will you be discussing in your keynote?

We're actually going to do something a little fun for the keynote address, without giving too much away. I think for a lot of time, this year or for the past couple of years, we focused a lot on burnout, passion, compassion, fatigue, wellbeing, and I think we did a great job of addressing all of those different things [in] 2020, 2021, and 2022, during the pandemic, which was definitely needed.

I would like to focus more on educating and moving to the veterinary technician needle. So I thought it'd be cool to actually go over some cool cases that I've seen in the ER that really happened and kind of go through those cases and explain to the veterinary technicians and even the veterinarians that will be in the room our role as veterinary technicians and kind of give them a quick down and dirty to these different cases, why it happened, what it what makes sense about it, how we treat it and just kind of go through it really, really quickly. I think it'd be fun just going through cases and getting some education about veterinary medicine. I like to have fun with different lectures or whatnot.

What does being a keynote speaker mean to you?

Oh, man I'll be honest with you when I got the word, it was one of those AHA moments of like, wait, this is happening, and it was really one of the greatest things that happened. I think it really meant the most to me coming from the dvm360^® crew because I remember when I received my first message from [Dr Adam Chrisman] and it was like ‘hey, love what you do. Thank you for being an advocate’ and it was like, wow, like this is a major conference and major group of people reaching out. People who know me, the comedy that I do or whatnot, all my veterinary technician family will tell you the one thing about Walter [is he] keeps it honest and he's going to tell it like it is kind of deal but also be genuine with it.

For the veterinary technician family to support me, the dvm360 family, and all the veterinary technicians that follow the Fetch conference because it was amazing the last conference I did, the rooms were packed, and it was just an amazing feeling. So, to have so many veterinary technicians rooting for me and being a part of this and having dvm360, who kind of gave me my start, be the next group of folks to say ‘hey you’re the next keynote speaker’, it just means a lot to me. I just want to tell you all thank you and I can't wait to have a great time and party hard with the veterinary technician family in Charlotte.

Is there something that you are looking forward to as your career advances?

I think what I look forward to is passing the baton. If there's one thing I would like everyone to know is we get caught up in veterinary medicine being a marathon of different things that we're trying to achieve, whether it's moving the industry forward, veterinary technicians trying to get better pay, recognition, helping with burnout, getting over to burnout, you know, and we've looked at this thing as a marathon and we can't look at it that way, or we're gonna burn ourselves out. It's a relay race and we got to know when to pass the baton.

I tell technicians all the time, Walter won't be here, skinnigolive won’t be here all day but I want to make sure I inspire someone where I can pass you the baton to do that. I encourage them and get on your TikTok, be funny, get on Facebook [because] you never know when it's your time to break out. I want to make sure I pass the baton, whether it's educational, whether it's inspiring them to be [a] social media content creator, whatever it may be, to inspire them to be the next person up. I'm here for that.