It's a good gig in a lot of ways! I've really enjoyed my time interning for the USDA for the last 4 years. Most of the vets I know who work for USDA have good work-life balance and enjoy their jobs. I personally really like epidemiology and import/export regulatory work, so the federal government is kind of my happy place. Most of the government jobs also seem to be less stressful than clinical work for a variety of reasons.
The pay is... not good to start. Especially compared to what people are being offered for private practice clinics right now. Some of my classmates are being offered $40K - $100K sign on bonuses for private practice jobs. Unclear if they have to give up their first born children or sign some sort of pact with the devil for all that money, but... Those bonuses are equivalent or more than my USDA funded scholarship is worth, and their pay is going to be equivalent or better than mine when we start next summer.
PSLF is the hope, but I'm also making plans to pay off all my loans if it doesn't work out because I have very little faith in the program based on how it's gone so far for people.
The benefits are better than the private sector when it comes to a lot of things - which helps with general work / life balance I think.
Retirement is the big one since the federal government has both a pension and a matching 401K. I'm planning on a nice comfortable retirement at a reasonable age.
Vacation time also seems to be better on the whole for federal service versus private sector companies - you get 13-26 days off per year depending on how many years you've worked for the gov't plus all 10 federal holidays. I personally will get 20 days off per year plus the 10 holidays based on my time in service, so when I start this summer I'll get the equivalent of about 6 weeks off per year. You can use that time to side gig, or passion project, or volunteer, or just take naps on the beach.
I think the health care coverage / costs are also better on average than the private sector as a whole (don't know about the vet med industry specifically) and the federal government recently instituted paid maternity leave.
Telework is also possible for a lot of jobs at least some of the time. (Maybe less for some of the field positions. Teepster can maybe talk more about this - I think he's got more experience in places that require employees to be in person because of the nature of the work.) Under the most recent administration, it was 1 day of telework per week as long as it was reasonable for your duties. Sounds like that may increase in the future (some agencies already had much higher allowances than the USDA); maybe it already has increased and I'm just out of the loop because I've been busy in clinics and not available to work since the most recent administration took over. I personally spent around 16 weeks working from home during COVID on various epidemiology or import/export policy projects. The offices I've interned with were also pretty flexible about teleworking for the day if you unexpectedly needed to for some reason. Makes life a lot less stressful if you can no harm-no foul work from home because your car broke down or you need to go to the dentist in the middle of the day or whatever.
Same for schedule of duty - a lot of federal jobs are flexible about the start and end time to the day as long as you are in the office during core hours. The places I've worked had core hours that were 9 am - 3 pm or 10 am - 2 pm. You could work say 7 am - 3:30 pm, or 9 am - 5:30 pm, or anything in between if your boss signed off on it as long as you met your job site's core hours. (HR prefers it to be about 8 hours per day, but it doesn't have to be). When I was working at a duty station 3.5 hours from home, I worked out a schedule so that I could start later on Mondays, leave earlier on Thursdays, and telework Fridays. That way I could drive to the office from my house really early on Monday morning and drive home on Thursday afternoons. It was a little unusual, but I met core hours and got to spend 3 days and 4 nights at home every week so I could see my family and pets.
Happy to answer specific questions if you have them from the intern perspective (or from the Veterinary Medical Officer perspective if you check back in about 6 months from now!)
