About

The Advanced Veterinary Academy at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine is a four-day summer program for high school juniors and seniors with a genuine head start on the path to veterinary school. Unlike introductory pre-vet programs that assume no prior exposure, the Academy requires applicants to have completed veterinary shadowing before arriving — the curriculum is designed for students who already know they want to pursue the field and are ready to see what that training actually looks like from the inside.

Over four days, students rotate through a compressed but substantive schedule: gross pathology, radiology, toxicology, food animal medicine, public health, and small animal clinical rounds. One of the program's more distinctive features is direct access to MU's teaching hospital — students scrub in to observe live surgeries alongside clinical students, and sit in on actual first- and second-year veterinary lectures rather than parallel programming created just for high schoolers. Applicants must be 16–18, have a minimum 2.7 GPA, submit a 500–1,000-word essay addressing their career goals and knowledge of the profession, and provide two letters of recommendation — one from a non-family adult and one from a veterinarian.

At four days, the Academy is not an immersion on the scale of the UMass Pre-Vet program. What it offers instead is concentrated clinical access that most high schoolers never get: operating room observation, live lectures inside an accredited veterinary college, and a realistic preview of what the academic demands of veterinary school actually feel like in the room. For a junior or senior who has already done the shadowing and is serious about this path, it is a meaningful step on the way to undergraduate DVM applications.