About

The Pre-Veterinary Medicine Summer Pre-College Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a two-week residential immersion for rising juniors and seniors with serious interest in veterinary medicine as a career. Hosted on the UMass Amherst campus and at the university's working Hadley and South Deerfield Farms, the program goes well beyond classroom exposure — students handle and restrain live sheep, goats, beef cattle, and horses, conduct hands-on rotations in comparative anatomy, pharmacology, clinical pathology, parasitology, diagnostic imaging, obstetrics, and wound management, and perform a trans-abdominal reproductive ultrasound on a sheep. Few pre-college programs put students this close to actual clinical work this early.

The program runs two weeks, Monday through Friday from 9am to 4pm, with evening and weekend social programming run by resident counselors. It is offered as a residential program, with commuter enrollment available for local students. The application requires a letter of interest describing animal-related experiences and long-term career goals, and a letter of recommendation specifically addressing the student's readiness for an intensive two-week academic experience. A notarized liability release form is required prior to arrival given the physical nature of farm work — students should come prepared with washable rubber boots and coveralls, which must be disinfected at the farm after each session.

The program is led by Dr. Beltaire, a veterinarian with over twenty years of clinical experience across universities and private farms and more than fifteen years of teaching and mentoring at the pre-college and undergraduate levels. Beyond the clinical rotations, students develop a personalized action plan for becoming a competitive veterinary school applicant — mapping out the academic requirements and animal experience hours the process demands — which gives the program a practical career-planning dimension most enrichment programs skip entirely.

For a student who is genuinely considering veterinary medicine and wants more than a shadow experience or a lecture series, this is one of the more substantive two-week programs available at any university. The farm access alone — working with large animals under faculty supervision — is difficult to replicate outside of an agricultural university setting.