What next - a future in research?
Employment is the ultimate goal on completion of any postgraduate training. As a student, you have invested time and money in gaining your qualification and now you want to put it to good use. You are enthusiastic. The 'extra' skills gained from a variety of compulsary or optional courses and seminars during your time at graduate school have given you confidence - your prospects are good.

Hopefully, you are destined to pursue a long and fruitful career in research. But, is an academic life in veterinary research truly an attractrive one? Generally speaking, yes it is. For some people it is literally a well paid hobby; it offers an unparalled opportunity for intellectual interaction and creativity and to pursue a topic they are passionate about. Financial constraints have to some extent reduced this freedom of thought so that nowadays the research scientist must be more focused, however, research still offers an intellectually stimulating environment to work in. It also offers tremendous opportunities to travel and to meet interesting and like-minded people; you are likely to make lifelong friends all over the world.

However, it would be remiss of me not to mention some of the pitfalls and disappointments that some people are likely to experience, especially veterinary graduates. In much of the world it is still considered a 'privilege' to work in research, to the extent that salaries and conditions of employment reflect this mentality. For some people, this means that a lifelong career in an increasingly competitive and demanding work environment is anything but attractive.

This situation has become all too apparent in the veterinary schools in Britain, where it has long been a concern that they fail to attract veterinary graduates into research. In a profession that is intrinsically a science, veterinary medicine needs to continue and expand its academic base and yet fewer and fewer veterinary graduates opt to become academics. This coincides with a time when the veterinary profession is more popular than any other, giving British schools the enviable ability to attract the nation's brightest school leavers to become undergraduate students. To help overcome the situation, there has been a concerted effort to expose undergraduate students to research, in the hope that they will consider it a real career option. However, although a proportion of veterinary graduates make a start in the right direction, by doing a PhD or other postgraduate course, they soon drop out of research. The result is a severe lack of research trained veterinary graduates entering into, and remaining in, academia, especially to a senior level. Difficulties in recruiting and keeping staff are undoubtedly the result of a poor salary scale offered to academics at universities and research institutes. The solution, therefore, will come only with the introduction of better career prospects and higher salaries for the veterinary trained academics. Without these changes there is every reason to worry that veterinary medicine will become a practice based profession that is dependent on a research base staffed almost exclusively by science graduates.

Traditionally, there has been a good balance of veterinary and science educated members in the research groups working at the veterinary schools and related research institutes. This combination has always been a highly successful one and, with the rapid advancement of techniques in fundamental research, it is perhaps more relevant than ever to have a significant presence of science trained researchers. However, there is an increasing threat to this balance, in favour of the science graduates. The worse this situation gets the weaker the veterinary schools will become and the less the profession will be able to benefit from the translation of revolutionary biomedical knowledge into clinical veterinary practice.

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