An Irish student studying veterinary medicine in Poland has called for a database to be set up linking students abroad with veterinary practitioners in Ireland, saying it is “frightening” how out of touch to home they are.
Laura Courtney from Limerick is going into her fifth year studying at Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences along with up to 250 other Irish students across dentistry, medicine, physiotherapy, podiatry and veterinary.
Although not having grown up on a farm, Courtney had a childhood dream of studying veterinary medicine.
In 2019, she went on to study general science at University of Galway, but after a year decided not to complete the degree, and to instead take up veterinary medicine in Poland as it “seemed so out of reach” in Ireland.
Studying veterinary in Poland
Courtney said the number of first-year students studying veterinary at her college has “grown exponentially” in the last four years.
In 2020 when she began her veterinary medicine course, there were around 30 first-year students, this has now jumped to up to 100, she said.
Speaking to Agriland, Courtney said there is a new veterinary course being introduced in Poland in the coming October, a move which she said she is not surprised by at all “because the demand is there and the Irish are missing out on it”.
“The Polish colleges are picking up the slack that the Irish have left because they’re opening up a new course. They’re seeing how many students are coming into Poland.
“The Irish, to be quite honest with you, don’t actually really know where the hell we are until we come back and say, ‘oh yeah, by the way, I qualified in Poland’. It’s frightening how out of touch the Irish are here to home,” she said.
After her remaining three semesters, Courtney said she would like to work in large-animal practice, unlike a lot of her fellow students who would be looking at small-animal practice. “There isn’t as many cattle people out there,” she said.
Courtney said she doubts that any of the Irish veterinary students at her college would ever consider staying in Poland because they don’t speak Polish, and the “only reason” they are there is to be able to come back and work at home in Ireland.
“None of us are there in Poland because we want to be working in Poland. We’re all in Poland because we can’t get educated here [in Ireland].”
“We need a link back to home,” she said and added that there are practices in rural Ireland that are close to being “a one man band”, an issue which she believes could be eased by creating a link between those rural vets and students studying abroad.
She said “nobody’s bothering to give us a helping hand while we are gone”, which has led her to come up with the idea of a database to connect students with vets in Ireland when they had any queries or vets were offering work experience.
Return to Ireland
When returning to Ireland as qualified vets, Courtney said there are different laws and medications that need to be understood. Learning how things work in Ireland will be a “full education” in itself, according to the vet student.
Students in her course are required to engage in unpaid practical training during the summer, comprising of four weeks with a vet and two weeks in a slaughterhouse, she said.
The way farming is being taught in Poland is “completely different” to Ireland. Irish students with no farming experience in Ireland would therefore likely be unfamiliar with seasonal calving and the terminology being used, she added.
Having worked on multiple different dairy farms in Ireland during her summer breaks has helped her “in a big way; you can’t buy that kind of experience”, she said.
Courtney is currently working on a dairy farm in Limerick which she loves.
Courtney said it seems Ireland is “quite happy” for students to be travelling to Poland to get educated there and then “reap the benefits” of them coming back to work in Ireland.
“We are paying €8,000 a year to get educated out there,” she added.
She believes there is “no incentive” for students to come back to Ireland: “The wages are too low for the work that is demanded. There is no real incentive for us to come back to Ireland other than the fact that our families are here. We grew up here.”
Courtney supports University of Limerick (UL) in its bid to host a new vet school in Ireland, however, she is worried that the funding for a new course in veterinary medicine could be split as a government announcement is yet to be made.
“If we’re going to have a vet school opening up in Ireland, it needs to be state-of-the-art. It needs to work with UCD [University College Dublin], not against them,” she said. UL is proposing to deliver a course in partnership with the Salesian Agricultural College in Pallaskenry.