I want to name a myth early in your career, because I think it’s shaping a lot of unnecessary guilt: the idea that work-life balance is something you achieve, like a certification, and once you have it, you’re set. In my experience, that’s not really how it works. Balance isn’t a fixed state you arrive at and stay in — it shifts week to week, sometimes day to day, and even the vets who look like they’ve got it figured out are usually just navigating the same tension you are, with a little more practice under them.
This expectation tends to land harder on some of us than others. Veterinary medicine is a female-dominated profession, and many of us grew up being told we could have the career, the family, the health, and everything else, all at once, without much guidance on what that actually takes in practice. Graduation also tends to line up with the years many people start thinking about building a family, which adds its own layer to an already full plate. None of that means you’re behind or doing something wrong — it’s just worth understanding why balance can feel harder to find right now than the messaging around it suggests it should be.
The First Years Take Real Time and Effort
Here’s the part I want to say plainly: those first three to five years after graduation are when you’re taking everything you learned in school and figuring out how to actually practice it. That doesn’t happen without putting in real time and real effort. I heard a story recently from a practice owner. He has a new associate, and every so often he’ll call her on a day off because something interesting has come in, a surgery he thinks she’d want to see. But she never comes in. Not once. And he wasn’t complaining about her work ethic. He was genuinely confused, because from where he sits, those calls were the moments that shaped him early on. He couldn’t understand why she’d pass on them.
It’s an Invitation, Not an Obligation
Here’s where I think the mindset shift needs to happen, on both sides. If your practice leader calls you about a case on your day off, that isn’t your employer asking you to do unpaid work. It’s someone more experienced than you offering to set aside their own time to teach you something they find genuinely fun to teach. That’s a gift, and it’s worth seeing it as one instead of an intrusion on your day off.
At the same time, it’s still your day off, and if you don’t want to come in, that’s completely fine. You shouldn’t feel guilty for protecting your time. What I would encourage is something more proactive than waiting to be called and deciding case by case. After you’ve been in practice a few months, you may start noticing patterns: a procedure you keep encountering but don’t feel confident with, a specialty you find yourself drawn to. Go to your practice leader and say it directly. Tell them you’d love to learn how to do a pyometra next time one comes in, or that you’re genuinely interested in orthopedics and would appreciate a call when that kind of case shows up. That tells your employer you’re open to putting in effort outside scheduled hours, on your own terms, with boundaries you set rather than ones imposed on you.
This Isn’t a Return to the Old Way
I want to be careful here, because I know exactly what this can sound like, and it’s not what I mean. The generation of vets before us didn’t have this figured out either. We worked ourselves into the ground, we normalized exhaustion as a rite of passage, and plenty of us paid a real price for it. I’m not suggesting you go back to that model. The first few years out of school are also widely recognized as a peak period for burnout in this profession. And I don’t say that to alarm you — I say it because pretending it isn’t true doesn’t help anyone. What I am suggesting is something more specific: that saying yes to a genuine learning opportunity, one you actually chose, is usually not the thing that burns people out.
Let Go of the Idea That You Can Do It All
A lot of the overwhelm in those first years is self-inflicted, not because anyone is weak, but because we stack impossible expectations on top of each other without noticing. You’re trying to become a competent veterinarian while also deciding this is the year you’ll eat perfectly, train for a marathon, and be a perfect partner, all at the same time, as if none of those things require anything from you. Letting go of that stack is one of the more useful things you can do for yourself. Give yourself grace, and accept that becoming a good vet is already a full undertaking on its own. It doesn’t need to share the calendar with everything else you’ve ever wanted to be good at, at least not yet.
Set Goals That Fit the Practice You’re Actually In
Where new vets often get tripped up is setting goals that are too broad to actually hit. Telling yourself “I’m going to get faster at spays” sounds reasonable, but it’s not something you can act on directly, and missing it just adds to the sense that something’s wrong with you. Break it down instead. Maybe this month you’re working on suturing efficiency specifically. Maybe next month it’s trusting your technician to handle anesthesia monitoring so your attention stays on the surgery itself instead of splitting in two directions. Small, specific, measurable pieces like that add up, and one day you’ll realize the spay that used to take you forty minutes now takes twenty, without ever having set “be faster” as the goal.
It also helps to keep your goals realistic for where you actually work. If endoscopy isn’t part of your current practice’s culture, it’s probably not the right goal for this year — it might be a great one for five years from now, once you’re somewhere it fits. Aim your effort at the gaps that are actually in front of you.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
A real piece of what drives burnout in those first years is the feeling that you’re the only one struggling this way, that everyone else is somehow finding it easier. That’s not true, and hearing it from other people who’ve been through it makes a real difference. This is exactly the gap Ready, Vet, Go was built to fill — a peer community for veterinarians navigating this same stretch of their careers. It’s not a replacement for a good in-person mentor, but it can be a strong complement to it — a place to bring the parts of early practice that don’t always come up mid-shift. The case that’s still sitting with you, the goal you’re trying to set for yourself, the moment you realized this is harder than you expected.
And it’s worth saying that last part out loud: passing the NAVLE and getting your degree isn’t the finish line, and the rest doesn’t automatically get easier just because school is behind you. If it feels hard right now, that’s not a sign that something’s wrong with you while it’s somehow easy for everyone else. It’s hard for everyone. You’ve worked so hard to get here — don’t stop now. You’re not done growing yet, and that’s exactly as it should be.