AFTER finishing my rotating internship at Wear Referrals, I was offered a second-year surgical internship with the practice.

I really enjoyed my first internship because I learned more than I could imagine, the staff were very welcoming and friendly from my first day until the last one and the infrastructures available were great.

I moved to the UK to specialise in small animal surgery, and I continued my career at the practice for another year in an environment I was familiar with, as focussing more on small animal surgery was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

I started my second internship last year in July and I have six-week rotations between soft tissue and orthopaedic surgery.

Occasionally I have a couple of night shifts to do or I work during the weekend to cover the out of hour service offered at Wear Referrals.

At the beginning of each day, I have a look at the schedule and the cases that are to be seen by the department I am in.

When possible, I see one case and am responsible for it while being supervised by one of the specialists I work with.

The surgical internship is a really helpful, necessary and complementary step of my career to find a residency position in small animal surgery in the future.

It allows me to accumulate more specific and detailed knowledge about surgical condition, to gain practical surgical experience and learn about minimally invasive procedures - like laparoscopic liver biopsies - which I might not see elsewhere.

Doing my surgical internship in a multidisciplinary veterinary hospital allows me to learn from other disciplines as well.

Journal clubs are organised on a regular basis by the soft tissue and internal medicine department, and we also have imaging rounds with our board-certified radiologist where we learn to describe X-rays or other imaging modalities.

It is hard work, and there is always something to do, an article to read, some notes to write or the next case to prepare, but it is definitely worth it.