Christine McPherson Long crosses the parking lot at Pineview Veterinary Hospital in Chadbourn, North Carolina, climbs into the mobile truck with two NC State vet students, and drives out to see a horse, a cow, a goat, a sheep, an emu, a dog, and a cat, all before the day ends.
That was Thursday. The students, rising third-years funded through NC State's Randall B. Terry Jr. Rural Veterinary Scholars Program, are halfway through their ten-week summer rotation. Long, a 2011 NC State DVM grad who bought this practice from her own mentor and now runs two clinic days a week plus mobile service across multiple North Carolina and South Carolina towns, loves having them. "Honestly, they make me a better vet," she told the vet school's news office. "They ask some of the craziest, but sometimes most poignant questions you could ever not think of."
The pipeline NC State built in 2024
Dean Kathryn Meurs created the rural scholars program in 2024 to expose more NC State veterinary students to careers in rural medicine. Rural practices often can't afford to pay student interns, so the ten-week summer program includes a stipend plus room and board for rising second- and third-year students interning at rural practices across the state. This summer, seven veterinary students worked at eight rural practices.
The timing wasn't arbitrary. The USDA launched its Rural Veterinary Action Plan last September to increase the number of rural food animal veterinarians across the U.S. Just this month, the Bovine Veterinarian published an article titled "We Need More Rural Veterinarians. Are We Looking in the Wrong Place?"
The students funded this summer got hands-on work. One student described palpating cows, horse dentals, trimming pig feet, stitching, and assisting in surgeries. Another named spays and neuters, equine dentistry, herd work, mass vaccine setups, and pregnancy-check documentation. One student saw a client bring a pet chicken in for an X-ray in a laundry basket. Another worked on a pet pig that needed a hoof trim. The variety is real, and the students named it as one of the best parts of the experience.
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What Long doesn't sugarcoat
Long told the students directly: "You can do whatever you want to do, but don't think for a second it's going to be easy. Your version of hard is definitely yours to kind of dissect."
The national shortage in rural veterinarians is most often attributed to high student debt in relation to significantly lower pay compared with urban small-animal vets, and to difficult working conditions. Long doesn't hide either reality. She bought the practice from her mentor while building a house and pregnant with twins. The practice evolved from large-animal exclusive to mixed animal. She runs mobile service every weekday.
One of the students, a rising third-year who worked at Pineview, said plainly: "Without the rural scholars program, I would have had to make a decision to take a job somewhere else this summer." Another student, who grew up in the area and whose family uses Long as their veterinarian, said she wanted to go back to her community and "learn what's the best you can do for them, working with a low budget, and kind of learning how to stretch dollars and clinically reason in a way that allows you to best spend the owner's money."
The data the program doesn't give yet
The students loved the experience. They named the people, clients, veterinarians, staff, as one of the best parts. They valued the hands-on work and the teaching. One student said, "You can't really put a price on that hands-on." Another said, "I don't like living in the city, so rural medicine is attractive to me."
But exposure during training and career placement after graduation are two different things. The source doesn't give retention or placement data, how many of the students who went through the program actually took rural jobs after graduation, or stayed in them past the first contract.
Without that data, the program is a well-funded summer rotation with strong anecdotal support from the students who went through it. Whether it changes the placement needle, whether students who spend ten weeks in a rural practice are measurably more likely to take a rural job, stay in it, or open their own practice in an underserved county, is a question the source doesn't answer.
What changes Monday
If you're an associate DVM weighing a rural offer against a suburban corporate job, the exposure question matters less than the comp-and-debt math. The students in this program got stipends, room, and board for ten weeks. You're looking at starting salary, loan repayment programs, sign-on bonuses, and whether the financial picture in a rural area actually works. The rotation gave them hands-on work and mentorship. It didn't change the financial equation they'll face when the offer letters come.
If you're an owner-DVM in a rural practice, you're competing for new-grad hires against corporate groups with bigger checkbooks. Long hosts students because she values teaching and because the students make her a better vet. If you're trying to hire, knowing what actually sways students, and what doesn't, helps you pitch your practice beyond "we need you." The students in this program named the people, the variety, the teaching, and the hands-on work as the best parts.
Long told the students to give themselves grace and forgiveness when they make mistakes, and to realize that the relationships made along the way are the most important thing. That's good mentorship. Whether it translates to retention is a question the program will have to answer with placement data the source doesn't yet give.