Japanese vet med students visit Purdue

A group of nine Japanese veterinary medicine students and their faculty mentor have come to Purdue to get a new perspective on their field. The group members, who come from Kitasato University in Towada, Japan, will be in West Lafayette for 13 days to study Purdue's veterinary medicine education techniques. One key difference between Japan and the United States, said Kazumi Taniguchi, Kitasato faculty member and mentor to the visiting students, is the level of hands-on work that students are allowed to do.

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In Japan, she said, only licensed veterinarians who have studied their field for a full six years are allowed to take cases and treat patients. At Purdue's school, however, students spend most of their fourth year working with animals and their owners. By coming here, Japanese students have a chance to see and experience more clinical forms of education, as well as getting to see Purdue's more advanced veterinary medicine equipment in action.

There are similarities between the two countries, though. In both, the last 50 years have seen a large increase in the number of women entering veterinary medicine. Japanese women, who now make up 50 percent of their country's vet med students, are drawn to the field because, as a licensed profession, it offers them more job security in a traditionally male-dominated society, Taniguchi said.

One such young woman is Ami Okino, one of the visiting students. Okino, who spent her first two days at Purdue studying small animal surgery at Purdue's Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hospital, said she's been excited to see the variety in Purdue's program, which encompasses business classes and behavioral training among other less-traditional disciplines. It's a contrast to Japan, she said, where the focus is only on treating disease and injury. When Okino, in her fifth year of the Japanese program, finishes her studies, she hopes to open her own small animal practice.

Many of her fellow students, however, are interested in government jobs, said Abdelfattah Nour, the School of Veterinary Medicine's director of international programs. Nour, who has organized the exchange program for the last 10 years, said that many veterinary medicine students want to work for the government as animal health inspectors or in other regulatory positions, which are vital in a country where most of the food is imported.

Nour called the exchange program, which also sends Purdue faculty to Japan to give lectures, a "fruitful relationship," and looks forward to continuing it.