This is a very timely inquiry and there are so many aspects to this question. I do think that Minnerbelle's first answer is a very good start.
I would add the following (as an employer):
I don't care about your grades that much, many people test well, but are terrible at doing things and interacting with clients. I'd like very much if you had JOBS before college especially if you worked as a vet assistant for a couple of year before vet school.
Getting out of vet school is just the beginning. You are a new grad with much to learn despite all you have learned. The hard work now starts and for the rest of your life. YOU have to start making decisions and learn to communicate with the client yourself. It is NOT enough to say I recommend doing X. You must learn to position your recommendation in your client's mind so that they understand WHY what you want to do is good for their pet. You need to learn to do the hard work of figuring out what is going on with their pet, to think things through several steps down the diagnosis path and where the client MIGHT end up in terms of time, cost and treatment effort on their part so that can better understand what they might need to do, if your initial suspicious are accurate.
In vet school, someone else in private practice did this hard work to end up referring a complex case to your school so that it can be fixed. At that point, the problem is already likely well defined.
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The rubber meets the road when you need to make a specific recommendation to a specific client to spend money because you want them to do so.
You are presented with a 10 year old indoor cat that is eating well but losing weight and has not been to the vet in five years.. You get a history and say:
"I want to do blood test on your cat to check it internal organs". The client declines and wonders if the cat need to be dewormed.
You repeat your recommendation, the client declines and worries aloud about money.
What do you do now? Give up and documentation your recommendation and let it go?
Or do you say something like:
I'm concerned about the weight loss. There are several reasons we can be seeing weight loss with a good appetite, especially in a 10 year old cat. The first thing we need to rule out is an over active thyroid (also know as feline hyperthyroidism). Aside: remember the audience is the client not the resident and professors you needed to impress in vet school with your medical terminology virtuosity. The less educated the client to more likely you will lose them using big medical words.
Then you continue and say an over active metabolism can cause weight loss as we are seeing here, it can also lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, even detached retinas and blindness IF uncorrected. It also makes the cat very grumpy. The treatment for this is an inexpensive tablet given twice a day for life. But the only way to learn if this is what your cat has is to do the blood test. I know it is a lot of money (Aside: always say this if needed) but this is what your cat needs us to do. (Of course, you ARE going to include the Free T4 in the test right? Otherwise, you will annoy the client by making them come back in a couple of days for the separate Free T4 panel, when you learn the T4 is within normal limits but toward the high end of normal). This will cost them more money than if you did it in the first place. Think things through - be prepared.
It is this kind of stuff that you will have to deal with every day assuming you work in that kind of medically excellent general practice.
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As a new graduate, you are going to be much slower at first than someone who is more experienced as you will be checking the references for all kinds of things. So, you will likely, in a busier place, get behind and then need to stay late because your chart need to be (should be) finished before you go home for the day. So you might need to stay late to finish. Why? It will start all over again in the next day, and unless the next day is slow you will get further behind. Also, your co-workers may need to consult your charts the next day or later the same day to answer a question from the same client, not to mention memory is faulty and you might forget an important detail.
What is your attitude toward work and your profession? Do you strive every day to learn, to be better, to re-examine everything you did to learn to do something better next time? Can you really be excellent by only working 40 hours in order to have a good work/life balance. Do you enjoy what you do so much that it does not seem like work? Otherwise, why are you running for the door at quitting time.
You ARE going to make a mistake and cause harm or kill something because you are new. Unless you are very lucky or good it will happen. People make their own luck via preparation. Are you willing to examine in detail what went wrong, your part in it and learn from the failure no matter now painful?
Don't blow things off or minimize stuff because confronting the screwups makes you feel bad? Would you want the pilots on your flight to your vacation garden spot to act like that? Gee: "I did not realize that we had so many people on the plane and that the headwinds used so much fuel and run out before we get to the destination airport?" At least the pilots have the incentive to get in right otherwise THEY might die too. The airline industry examines EVERY crash in detail to learn how to avoid the problem the next time. You should do the same in your profession.
Here is another VERY important thing to realize: The last vet to see the pet said they think that X is the apparently unresolved problem. Do NOT accept X at face value. Why do you assume the last person was correct? Did you read the ENTIRE history BEFORE going in to see the pet? Why not? Are you going to take your own history or rely on some one else's interpretation? The former is the only correct course of action. Anything else is lazy and mediocre. Judgemental? Yes. What kind of vet (or MD) do you want to see your pet or family member.
Another thing: Get comfortable charging for your time, that exam fee pays you, the assistant, the receptionist, as do the test and medications you prescribe. Your time is valuable, you expect to get paid, so does your employer by charging the fees needed to pay everyone and keep the place open and in good repair. If you are not comfortable in our skills and feel bad about charging for your limited knowledge, too bad, get better, improve, learn and strive for excellence. Then you will feel good about charging for your time, you should. You also cannot take all day on a small number of cases, otherwise you are not generating the revenue needed to help pay for everything including your self.
Have a little sympathy for the business owner. Profit is not a dirty word. You have to make a profit on everything to provide the funds to pay for everything and everyone, to provide money for repair and new gadgets, raises, bonuses, computers, new paint jobs. The owner deserves a return on their hard work, risk taking and to compensate for the fact that they are likely personally guaranteeing every financial commitment the practice has.
You worry about your rental, car payment and student loans.
The boss worries about having enough money for rent, payroll, taxes, lease payments on computers, other equipment, paying the lab bill, insurances, utilities, internet, new computers, paying people care for the equipment, cleaning people, building maintenance which the landlord in a lease space almost never does. You think you have alot to deal with and you do. The boss has more, way more, you have no idea. So cut them some slack, the number of decisions and screwups that happen daily are maddening. The demands on money are relentless and the boss HAS to be concerned about this.
Ask yourself. Do you want to work in a day practice that basically does wellness, gives vaccines handles minor issues and turfs all the complex stuff (Personally this would be boring) to internal medicine, emergency, etc. . If so, then you are spared a lot of hard work since you won't have any cases to manage for the long term, no need to educate the client and explain complex diagnostic trees. Try to know what you want and find a place that matches. Many new grads change jobs after the first year because they are shocked by the first job and think the next jobs will be better and it might.
Finally: Be a throughout, excellent, cooperative, helpful vet that advocates for the pet. You will do the right thing and help the pet and therefore generate the needed revenue and then some. Money is not the motivation for what we do but a natural positive consequence of doing a medically excellent job.
