If you are accepted in a program to receive your md, dvm, etc., do you receive a masters along the way? If you don’t, would you then only have your bachelor’s and your medical degree? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I’m having trouble finding straightforward answers online.
What would be the difference between a PhD in Veterinary Medicine and a DVM? Is there any advantage to getting the PhD? I know to be a practicing vet you need the DVM, but would you be able to teach at a university with a DVM and no PhD or other graduate degree?
A medical degree is considered a terminal degree. You don’t receive a masters because these degrees are in a different category.
I’m guessing you can teach in med school without getting a Ph.D. But if you’re getting the degree to teach…
No, you don’t get a master’s along the way to an MD or a DVM in a traditional 4-year program. There are some 5-year programs that allow you to earn both an MD (or DVM) and a master’s - like an MD/MBA program or a DVM/MPH program. But those are specialized programs that you deliberately apply to; it’s not like a PhD, in which you earn a non-terminal MA along the way in most programs. So yes, you would only have a BA and an MD or DVM (but that’s all you really need to practice).
I don’t know that there is a PhD in veterinary medicine - there are PhDs in related fields, like animal science or zoology or something. The difference is that the DVM is a practice degree; it prepares you to practice veterinary medicine on animals of all kinds. You will learn about research, but mostly in the context of consuming it to help you improve your practice. Some DVMs do eventually go onto do research, but generally they do a postdoctoral fellowship first that trains them in that research. A PhD, by contrast, is a research degree. You do not learn about the practice of medicine on animals; you instead learn how to conduct research in some specific area of inquiry.
And yes, you can teach in a veterinary sciences program with a DVM and no other degrees. Just casually browsing the faculty listing at a top veterinary college (Penn), it would seem that around 40-50% of the faculty there do have PhDs in addition to their DVM, though. Flipped through the faculty at another top veterinary college (UIUC) and the same seemed to be the case there. However, that’s for tenure-track faculty. Clinical faculty (who often come on to teach 1-2 classes a year, do research - often in tandem with a tenure-track professor, and work in the hospitals/clinics associated with the university) usually just have the DVM.
@juillet thank you!!! Do you have any idea what kind of job one would go into after doing a phd/dvm program and the difference in pay as opposed to just the dvm?
There are programs which combine MD and Ph.D. and DVM and Ph.D. The Ph.D. is a research-oriented degree while the MD and DVM are professional degrees. That is the major difference. You do not necessarily need a Ph.D. to teach in a medical school, but you absolutely do need an MD (DVM for veterinary school). Vetirinary schools have both Ph.D. and DVM faculty.
Well, you don’t absolutely need an MD to be on faculty in a medical school - there are professors at medical schools that have PhDs only. I think there are certain classes that only MDs can teach, but some that PhDs can - for example, a CUNY medical school is currently hiring PhDs in the social sciences to teach classes at the intersection of social science and medicine to MD students, and there are several medical schools that do this. Sometimes PhDs in the biomedical sciences teach basic science classes. And a large proportion of medical school faculty have research appointments only, so they’re on the faculty while not teaching any classes - just doing research. However, I do think that if you KNOW that being on the faculty of a med school is your end goal, you should get an MD.
What kind of job does someone go into with a PhD/DVM? Generally speaking, someone who gets a PhD and a DVM wants to do research that combines the clinical aspects of the DVM with the basic science aspects of the PhD. So, generally speaking, their end goal would probably be to be a professor at a university (most likely in a veterinary school and/or a medical center, doing some kind of basic biological science or biomedical science research). Alternatively, some of them might desire to go into a more practice-oriented public health research position - like with the CDC (they hire vet-scientists!) or a state health department or something.
Frankly, I don’t think that a PhD/DVM would get paid any more for the same job than someone with just a DVM. Like if a DVM and a PhD/DVM both started a professor job at the same university in the same year, they would probably get paid roughly the same.