Tune in as we chat with VIN Foundation board member Dr. Matt Holland, and hear the story of his unconventional path to being a veterinarian. Matt shares the positive impact of his time in leadership with SAVMA, how the coronavirus has impacted his family’s living situation, and what it’s like being a millennial in this age of COVID.
You may learn more about the VIN Foundation, on the website, or join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
If you like this podcast, we would appreciate if you follow and share. As always, we welcome feedback. If you have an idea for a podcast episode, we’d love to hear it!
TRANSCRIPT
Intro
Jordan Benshea: Welcome to the Veterinary Pulse podcast. My name is Jordan Benshea. I’m the Executive Director of the VIN Foundation. Veterinary Pulse is the heartbeat of the profession. Join us as we talk with veterinary colleagues about critical topics, from student debt to mental health, and share stories. Stories connect us as humans, as animals, as a veterinary community. This podcast is made possible through individual donors like yourself, and our technology partnership with VIN, the Veterinary Information Network. Thank you for being here.
Meet Matt Holland, DVM
Jordan Benshea: This episode, we’re having a discussion with VIN Foundation board member, Dr. Matt Holland. Matt came to the veterinary profession on a road some might not expect. We discussed the defining moment he realized he wanted to be a veterinarian, and what he thinks would be helpful to colleagues in this age of COVID. In his new position as a Veterinary Information Network, VIN, team member, Matt is helping to support veterinary students. Thank you for listening. Hi, Matt, thanks so much for being here with us today.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jordan.
Jordan Benshea: Matt, can you give us a little introduction to yourself, share with us what veterinary school you went to, your grad year, etc.?
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes, so I went to the College of Veterinary Medicine at University of Illinois, and I graduated in 2017. I moved to Washington DC that fall and I did the AVMA congressional fellowship for a year, then I moved over to the executive branch and worked for the USDA up until a couple of months ago when I started working at VIN.
Jordan Benshea: We should probably mention that Matt started working at the Veterinary Information Network, VIN, earlier this year, and prior to that he’s a VIN Foundation board member. He still serves as a VIN Foundation board member and also works at VIN doing a lot of different things, helping with the students, and just an overall great resource for us, so we’re really grateful to have him here. Since you are a VIN Foundation board member, when did you first get introduced to the VIN Foundation?
Matt Holland, DVM: My first introduction to the VIN Foundation was in 2015 at the AVMA convention in Boston when Dr. Tony Bartels gave the Climbing MT. Debt presentation to the SAVMA House of Delegates. I also met Paul at that meeting, and I guess the rest is history from there.
Jordan Benshea: Were you involved in SAVMA when you were in school?
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes, in my first year I became a SAVMA delegate for my class at Illinois, and then the SAVMA House of Delegates chose me to be their president-elect, which was really, really cool and really humbling that they did that. All four years I was involved with SAVMA, and that’s how I met Paul, through organized veterinary medicine.
Jordan Benshea: Yeah, Dr. Paul Pion is the VIN co-founder and a VIN Foundation board member as well.
Matt’s Journey to Veterinary Medicine
Jordan Benshea: It seems like you have an interesting path once you graduated veterinary school, but can you tell us a little bit about your path prior to veterinary school and how you ended up going to veterinary school?
Matt Holland, DVM: It was a second career for me because I graduated from Illinois in 2017, but I graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa in 2007 with a Bachelor’s in journalism. I grew up in the Midwest, just outside Chicago, and then moved to Iowa for undergrad and came back to Chicago and worked in sports television production. I worked at the Big 10 Network. I worked for a television station covering the Chicago Bears. Then I moved to New York for a year and worked at Major League Baseball network. I came back to Chicago and worked for that same station covering the Bears again. Throughout all of those jobs, all those jobs are seasonal, so in the offseason, I still had bills to pay, so I found jobs that all ended up having to do with animals one way or another. My first job in the offseason was working as a dog walker, and then I worked at a kennel, and then I worked at a clinic, and then I worked at a research lab. Throughout that process that was over six years of doing two or three different jobs each year was when I decided that I thought I would make it a profession instead of a side job, because I really enjoyed working with animals. I got to see how many different things you could do as a veterinarian, because I had all those different experiences. I wasn’t really fulfilled by working in television production, so it was out of necessity that I started working with animals because I just needed a part time job. Slowly, I decided to change careers, but I didn’t have any of the prerequisites. I remember being at Drake, and a lot of my friends were in the pharmacy program. They would come back from class and complain about organic chemistry and how horrible it was. I remember saying things like, well, if it’s so bad, then why are you doing that? I was eating my words a little bit when the only way I could get to veterinary school is by suffering through organic chemistry, so I guess what goes around comes around there.
Jordan Benshea: Well, was there a defining moment where you thought, I definitely want to be a veterinarian? You mentioned a gradual progression. Was it a more gradual progression, or is there something that sticks out in your mind as that specific day or timeframe?
Matt Holland, DVM: It was kind of both, and I’ll try to explain that. The real sudden, aha moment was there. There was one moment when I knew that I wanted to do something different. I wanted to change careers, but I didn’t really know to what. That moment was when I moved back to Chicago, because part of the reason I moved to New York was I was getting frustrated with that, so I thought maybe I’ll move to a different city, I’ll try covering a different sport, change some of the variables, and see if that helps. It didn’t. When I moved back, I was like, alright, I’m going to do this job. The pay is decent, and it’s flexible enough and I like the people there. It’ll give me time to think about what I want to do next. I knew at that point that I was going to do something different, and that probably meant going back to school. It was a slow, gradual decision to have that be veterinary school because I started reflecting on all these experiences, and thinking, oh, you can do all these different things. It’s interesting, because I didn’t think that I was going to do anything policy related when I applied to vet school, and on the first day of school, I thought of all the things that you could do with a degree. I wasn’t really considering doing anything policy related, but that changed at some point during school.
Jordan Benshea: Do you think it was your time with SAVMA and your experience there that might have opened you up to that or something else?
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah, I think that was a huge part of it. I think another part was the person who taught the public health and policy courses at Illinois, he and I just happened to click really well. I took all of his elective courses, and it turns out he grew up in the same place that my dad grew up in, so we had some small world shared experiences and we bonded. He had done one of these policy fellowships that I did, so he knew all about that. Sometimes it’s hard to find a rhyme or reason why things happen, but like you mentioned, involvement with organized veterinary medicine I think was a huge factor in sparking my interest in policy and policy related jobs after school.
Jordan Benshea: It’s amazing how much a teacher can have such an impact on students. I definitely experienced that going to school, and it’s so wonderful to be, in that it completely enriches the learning experience, right?
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes, and a good coach or a good boss, if there is somebody that makes you motivated to show up, then that makes a world of difference. That’s kind of what I was getting at. I didn’t really have much of an interest in public health or policy when I got to school, but he was such a good teacher that he made it interesting and then for me, that made it interesting to study and interesting to learn more about and get good at. That’s the same way with a coach or with a boss. If they inspire you to get better at something, then that takes a lot of effort out of trying.
Impact of COVID-19 on Veterinary Life
Jordan Benshea: We’re in this new age now of COVID and so much has been turned upside down. I know your life personally has been. How has COVID impacted your life? How is your life now different than it was in say January?
Matt Holland, DVM: In January, I still lived in Washington, DC, and my wife and I were getting ready to move to my parents’ house. Our plan was to move to Illinois. She’s also from the same area and so almost all our family and a lot of our friends are here. We were fixing to come back, and maybe get a place to be long term. We didn’t have anywhere to stay, and we didn’t want to get a place sight unseen, so our plan was to put our stuff into storage and live out of my parents’ house for a few weeks while we found something. It was in those few weeks that the world changed overnight. I mentioned earlier where I grew up, just outside Chicago back in that same house that I grew up in, and so that’s all come full circle. It’s changed things quite a bit. What’s interesting is how things that you used to take for granted are totally different now, so like getting groceries or going to the pharmacy. You can’t go to the gym anymore. You have to work out at home. That kind of stuff that just in January if somebody told me that you couldn’t do those things anymore, you’d be like, what are you crazy! One positive thing is, especially here now that I’m with my parents, they’re still healthy and they’re happy and it’s a lot of bonus time to get with those people that you love, and my wife is here, too, so that’s nice. It’s kind of fun to have this new routine that the four of us have. We all have dinner together most nights, and this thing that we did growing up, my family used to go around the dinner table and share favorite parts of the day. We’re doing that at our dinner table again, these many years later, so that’s been a fun silver lining to it all is to tell each other what we’re thankful for.
Jordan Benshea: This is really a great opportunity for those that are not solo isolating or live near family are able to have their family in their isolation pod. It’s a huge opportunity to really cherish those moments and enjoy those moments with the family. I know that for a lot of people it’s very challenging, especially for a lot of parents who are trying to homeschool or people learning how to work from home. Are you used to working from home? How has that shift been for you?
Matt Holland, DVM: I got used to working from home last fall. Part of the reason I was thinking about a job change was because the agency I worked for out in DC that was called the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA, was relocated from DC to Kansas City, from DC to KC. From August until January, so over five months, I was working from home pretty much every day, so I got used to that. My wife has done quite a bit of telework in her roles. She works for the Red Cross, so a lot of her team is dispersed throughout the country, so there are a lot of days when, now it’s every day, even when we’re not in the middle of a pandemic where she works from home. Fortunately, it hasn’t been very disruptive in terms of our normal days. My parents work from home, too, so we all do our jobs during the day, just together in the same house. It’s a strange, new normal, but we’re getting used to it.
Jordan Benshea: It’s one big happy working from home family.
Navigating Uncertainty and Community Support
Jordan Benshea: Based on your time in policy, how do you see it impacting the veterinary profession with regards to COVID in this time that we’re living in?
Matt Holland, DVM: Well, I guess, a couple different answers. One would be, like acutely here we’ve seen the CARES Act and how that is impacting loan repayments specifically and that one repayment impacts a huge percentage of our profession, and almost every new and recent grad. In the bigger picture, I think it highlights the importance of policymakers in general, because the people who decide what’s in the CARES Act are policymakers, so I know it’s not a thing that a lot of us think about a lot. Local politicians and these people that seem to only ask for your money and time every so often and then they disappear, but for better or for worse, they are the ones who make the rules that we all have to play by. So, I think it’s important to stay engaged to make sure that you’re happy with who is representing you, and if not, then to do something about it.
Jordan Benshea: What kind of resources do you think would be helpful for the veterinary profession in this time, either for pre-vets, veterinary students, new graduates, or full time veterinarians? Where are you hearing from your colleagues and friends that there’s a need or the holes?
Matt Holland, DVM: The most common thing that I hear is that people don’t know, and I know this goes without saying, but people don’t know what to do. That goes for what to do when somebody shows up curbside, or only letting one person into the clinic at a time. Do we even take this case or is it totally elective? Are we saying no to electives right now? People needing a protocol from start to finish in terms of how to do normal operations. It’s not surprising, because I think about how we were in vet school if we got a case, and we didn’t know what to do. Well, the most important thing is to have an answer for that, and that answer can come in a couple different ways. It can be a teacher who can help you through that. It can be a classmate. It can be a resource. It can be looking up how a previous similar case was handled in that way. What I’m getting at is, in this huge time of uncertainty, when we really for the most part don’t know what we’re doing because we don’t have a reference point, that the most important thing is to have people to lean on. That’s why I think VIN is such a great resource and the VIN Foundation in this time because at the very least, it is like having a classmate where even if there is no rounds on how to handle operating in a pandemic on this scale of COVID, there is no blueprint for that, but there is a community like VIN and resources like the VIN Foundation. It’s our job to pay attention to how everybody is handling it, to create these resources on the fly, and help people with what they’re going through right now as we speak. That’s what I think people in our profession need, and that’s why I think it’s really cool to be spending my time on stuff that helps the profession and in the time that they need it.
Jordan Benshea: I think that that’s a very good point that usually in life, there are reference points or people of expert knowledge that you can refer to. In this time, where there is so much uncertainty and so much unknown, I think a majority of people are just mind blown, right? I mean, where we were March eighth versus April 8th is just such a vast difference, and where we were March 8th versus March 18th was such a vast difference. There’s no way for us to know how to navigate that. These points of who do we go to, or who do we ask, or what are our reference points, they’re just blown out of the water. Many, many people are feeling just ‘whoa, like what has happened?’ and that can be challenging on a personal level and then really challenging on a professional level to your point, practice owners who are thinking, ‘Okay, do I do what’s elective? What’s not elective? Are vaccines elective or are they not elective depending on where you are and the outbreaks in your area?’ Some pet owners might not be happy if grooming is considered elective? Others might think, oh, well, maybe it’s not. It’s so tricky to navigate that or like curbside and how does the curbside work? Are people going to respect the curbside? How do we even navigate all this? I think, to your point about the big sense that we keep coming back to is this sense of community. I really see that being one of the silver linings in the midst of all of this is people leaning on each other and starting from a place of kindness. Starting from a place of none of us are experts here, and none of us have really any idea. We’re all trying to do the best we can so how can we help each other. I’m hoping that that’s one of the areas that will grow and expand in the midst of this age is the sense of community and supporting each other and being there for each other, which I think is definitely a huge benefit of VIN and the community there. Ideally that the Foundation, the resources that we’re offering, can support veterinary colleagues for those times because I think that sense of community is going to be just vital in us getting through all this personally and professionally and determining where those senses of community are, and identifying them so that you can have them in your life to work from and refer back to.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yes, and I think it’s important that we all take a step back and realize that. Look at the CDC, they’re changing their recommendations in no small ways from week to week. I think we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves and be kind to ourselves and each other because things are going to change. What seemed like the very best thing to do in one moment might be different just a couple days later, and that’s hard to wrap your head around. Also, the act of doing that is not something that almost any of us have experience with, so it’s okay to feel a little bit lost in times like this.
Jordan Benshea: Absolutely. I think that’s a good point about being kind with ourselves and being kind to our colleagues and understanding that we’re all navigating this for the first time. As you said, the CDC changing their policies with things and if you told us a month ago that something called the CARES Act was going to come out, and that they would forego student loan interest for a while, I don’t think anybody would have believed you. The drastic measures that have been taken, and that are continuing to be looked at to be possibly taken are so huge! It’s a completely new era, and that support in that community, I think, has been one of the most important things to help us all get through this in the different areas of our life.
Social Media and Professional Concerns
Jordan Benshea: You spend a fair amount of time on Facebook, from my understanding. Is that correct?
Matt Holland, DVM: I mean, I think it’s in my contract as a millennial. I have to log so many hours on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter before I can call it a day.
Jordan Benshea: What are you seeing? Are you involved in Facebook groups? How are you getting your news and information about the profession and about things in general in this time?
Matt Holland, DVM: I would say there are, I was going to say a handful, but at this point seems like more than a handful of groups that are focused on different topics, so like an early career group and some groups that are focused specifically on the clinical practice aspect of the profession. There’s one that’s focused on policy. The interesting thing is that it’s all veterinarians, and so it’s cool to see everybody’s world through the lens of a veterinarian.
Jordan Benshea: What are you hearing are some of the biggest concerns or things that could be done to be helpful?
Matt Holland, DVM: Again, if you were to ask me in January, I think you would have had a pretty different answer. I think the answer in January would be wellness and mental health gets a lot of attention and it should. There are a lot of different things that are stressful for veterinarians, and almost every practicing veterinarian, even if they handle stress well, they’re dealing with quite a bit of it. One of those things that is related to wellness is debt, so there are groups that are focused on debt and repayment, as well. I would say those are the top two things that people talked about in January. Now, of course, everything has this COVID tint on it. Now it would be kind of what I was talking about earlier is like people just wanting to know what to do, and sharing what they’re trying, what they’re doing, what works for them, what hasn’t worked for them. It’s like everything else has been put off to the side. Well, it’s like an emergency room now this is the top thing to triage is how to function in this world and the rest of it will follow after.
Jordan Benshea: I think that’s a good point. If you knew a month ago what you know now, would you change anything?
Matt Holland, DVM: This may be on a lighter note, I had been thinking about getting a new bike for a while and with moving across the country, I was, okay, I will save the bike project for later. Plus, it’s winter, so I’m not really going to use it a whole lot right now, but I wish I had done a new bike because my old one is busted and that is something that’s great for my mental health. If I can’t figure out a way to bike, then I’ll figure out a different way to stay regularly active, because if I had known, I definitely would have solved the bike dilemma.
Jordan Benshea: I’ve heard a rumor you like to create haikus.
Matt Holland, DVM: I do.
Jordan Benshea: Do you have a haiku that you’d like to share with us?
Matt Holland, DVM: Let me go through the bank that I’ve written recently. This is the one I wrote last week. It goes like this. It’s been a long month. JK, who am I kidding? It’s been a long year.
Jordan Benshea: Very pertinent.
Reflections and Outro
Jordan Benshea: Hopefully, we can find a way through focusing and leaning on our community to find silver linings in this situation and come out of this better than we went in with new opportunities and new light shone on areas that we otherwise wouldn’t have expected to see. That’s my hope.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah. I think it’s a time to reflect on the things that are really important to us, especially because we should have the time since we’re not supposed to be out and about spending it on other things. Like you said, when we come out the other side, we can take what we learn in those reflections of what is actually important to us and focus on those things, even when things do start to return to normal a little bit.
Jordan Benshea: Hopefully it is sooner rather than later, once everybody is in a place where they feel safe, and that we can responsibly do so. Thank you so much, Matt, for joining us. We really appreciate the conversation.
Matt Holland, DVM: Yeah, thanks again for inviting me.
Jordan Benshea: Talk to you soon. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Veterinary Pulse. Please check the Episode Notes for additional information referenced in the podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please follow, subscribe, and share a review. We welcome feedback and hope you will tune in again. You can find out more about the VIN Foundation through our website, VINFoundation.org, and our social media channels. Thank you for being here. Be well.
