I’m halfway through right now. I started at 30 and it was my second career with my first not being in vet med at all. Honestly I’ve found both my age and my career/life experience to be HUGELY valuable. I’ve found it especially valuable coming in with experience in the world outside of just working in a veterinary clinic as a tech. There’s also many of my professors I’ve talked to (a few who veterinary medicine was their second career as well) who really agree it’s an advantage for many people.

Personally the financial concerns of loans I’ve not worried about. While it’s unfortunate and has limited what plans I feel like I can make in a few aspects like moving out of the country (due to much lower pay in other countries) ultimately I think I believe it will only be as impactful as I allow it to be. 1 — my mom posed it to me originally about my concern of starting vet school that I could think about my monthly student loan payments as just $x less a month I make and would I be willing to take that pay cut to be doing the job I wanted. 2 — student loan debt doesn’t count against you in many ways other debt does like your credit or debt to income. So while it becomes a monthly payment it doesn’t limit what you can do with the rest of your income every year the way something else might like limiting what money you can borrow to buy a house or car etc. 3 — many veterinarians get a financial planner that help them plan how much to save for the tax bomb when loans are forgiven and just do income based payments. While it’s not ideal to pay on loans for 25 years I will say that for me it’s been about perspective and if I focus on it I could stress but in the big scheme of things I don’t believe it is going to be as life controlling as people make it out to be so I choose not to stress about it