Another Broad
Spectrum Veterinary Student Association birthday has come and gone! Our
wonderful group turned two years old at this year’s symposium. And what a great
symposium it was! Over 1,300 students from all over the world made their way
down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for a weekend filled with daytrips, wetlabs,
lectures, and nighttime events all geared towards veterinary students! How
awesome is that! But of course, our favorite event was by far The Diversity
Forum. The Diversity Forum is where Broad Spectrum was born, and has been
celebrating each year by holding a national meeting for all our LGBT+ and allied
veterinary student members.
The Diversity
Forum spanned a few days and it all started with several booths in the exhibit
hall advocating for diversity in the veterinary profession. On Thursday, Amanda
manned the Broad Spectrum booth most of the day, and met many wonderful
people!
We also handed
out awesome BSVSA pins! Everyone loved these and snatched them up quickly. We
even had people come to us after we ran out of pins asking if we had any more.
Don’t worry, we are working on updating our design and getting more pins and
magnets to make available to all!
The booth
continued to have lots of visitors on Friday, and we want to thank everyone who
came and spoke with us! We would also like to thank Dr. Mike Chaddock from the
LGVMA for helping us work the booth for a few hours during the day. We also want to thank the members of Lambda&Friends, the LGBT+ group at Western University of Health Sciences, for the wonderful gifts that they presented to us! These gifts were amazing and we appreciate your support for our organization!
But the real fun
came on Friday night. The LGVMA along with BSVSA hosted a networking event at
Bar 102 in the lobby of the Belle of Baton Rouge Hotel. We had a fantastic
turnout and we want to thank everyone that came out to socialize with the LGVMA
and Broad Spectrum.
We enjoyed drinks
And food
And had lots of fun!
We even had
students from different countries come to our event!
We want to thank
Dr. Mike Chaddock and Dr. Linda Detwiler for representing the LGVMA at this
event. We of course also want to thank the LGVMA for sponsoring the food and
drinks as well! Do you know of a better way to spend your Friday night than to
hang out with a crew of LGBT+ veterinary students and their allies?? We didn’t
think so.
Saturday began with your very own BSVSA officers, Arturo and Amanda, leading
the Broad Spectrum VSA National meeting. We got some great pictures from LGBT+
groups all over the country and we appreciate all the awesome input!
During our
meeting, we talked about past, present, and future events and aspirations for
Broad Spectrum VSA and how we hope to reach out to many more students to
provide support, resources, and empowerment.
We are currently looking for new
leadership for Broad Spectrum VSA and would love to have new, fresh minds to
give us ideas of how we can better serve our community. If taking a leadership
role sounds too intense for you at the moment, we would love to still keep in
touch with you! If you would like to be a BSVSA contact for your school, please
send your name, email, and the name of your school to
BroadSpectrumOutreach@gmail.com.
After the BSVSA
national meeting, we had a very interesting and thought provoking lecture from
Dr. Patrick Mahaney. His lecture was entitled “5 Steps to Build your Brand As a
Reflection of Your Principles”. Dr. Mahaney is one of our out veterinarians in
the profession and we appreciate him coming to our Diversity Forum and sharing
his story with us. If you would like to know more about the lecture, please let
us know! We would be happy to share these wonderful tips with you!
Following Dr.
Mahaney, we had another fabulous lecture from out veterinarian and LGVMA board
member, Dr. Mike Chaddock from Texas A&M Univeristy. His lecture was entitled “Practicing Veterinary Medicine in a Multi Cultural Society- Sexual
Diversity” Dr. Chaddock shared some very interesting statistics about what it
is like to be an LGBT+ veterinarian in the profession and how the community
viewpoint on LGBT+ rights has changed over the years. We were very lucky to
have such a powerful speaker like Dr. Chaddock! If your school would be
interested in having Dr. Chaddock or another LGVMA member speak, please let us
know and we would be happy to get you in touch with the right people.
Following Dr.
Chaddock’s lecture, we had a delicious lunch that was sponsored by LSU SAVMA
Symposium. We are very thankful for SAVMA Symposium’s support in making the
Diversity Forum a great success!
We then followed
this lunch up with a riveting diversity panel. During the time the panel had
together, we had some very interesting dialogue on what it meant to be diverse
in the veterinary profession. We had veterinarians from all over the world and
we learned a whole lot about what it is like to be “different” in our
profession.
The Diversity
Forum ended with the national meeting for VOICE (Veterinary Students as One in
Culture and Ethnicity). Many of you already know about VOICE and if you don’t,
you should check to see if your school has a chapter. VOICE and Broad Spectrum
VSA have very similar goals, to support the diversity initiative in our
profession. We applaud them for the hard work that they have been doing in the
past year and we hope that we can work with them more often at the national
level to advocate for diversity.
Symposium finally
ended with the very elegant Gala (pronounce “Gay-la” in Louisiana =P) We enjoyed
a very nice dinner with friends and colleagues of the LGBT+ community.
And of course, the
night would not be over without some dancing! Many of our BSVSA members enjoyed
the night out in the town and took advantage of the abundance of bars and clubs
to have a little bit of fun!
We thoroughly
enjoyed our time down in Baton Rouge and we want to thank everyone who helped
make this event a wonderful success. We could not have asked for a better group
of people to come out and support us. You will always remain dear to us. We
hope that from this experience, we have sparked some interest in your hearts to
become more active in advocating for LGBT+ rights in the veterinary community.
If you have any thoughts, questions, comments, or just want to chat, send us an
email, facebook message, or tweet and let us know what you’re thinking!
Your BSVSA Officers
Arturo Otamendi
Amanda Fischer
