1. Madison Collier
Informational Interview
Career Planning
11-10-14
I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Coleman who is vet at the animal hospital Four
Paws. I did this interview over the phone (513-382-7765, and it took place on Monday
November 10th. As of right now I know that I want my career path to be working with animals,
but I haven’t yet narrowed down the many options in this field. I figured that a vet would be a
good person to talk to because that is probably the most popular and possible highest paying job
in that field. I found it interesting that Dr. Coleman started his business from the ground up in my
home town. The interview I had with Dr. Coleman went better than expected. He told me things
about his job that I would have never even thought about. He shared that the best and most
rewarding part of his job is surgery. Not only is he helping animals but he also likes surgery’s the
best because every day is something different. He explained that if you are a surgeon for humans
your work is very specialized to a specific area, Dr. Coleman has the opportunity to preform
many different surgeries. Like every job, there are down sides as well. A stressful part of the job
is when a family is not able to afford the procedure needed to be done to their pet. His job as a
vet is to identify a problem with the pet and then try to fix it. He explained to me how frustrating
it can be when he and his team are not able to figure out what is wrong. A more challenging part
to working with animals rather than humans is animals cannot tell you what is wrong. Before this
interview I had never thought about the emotional toll having this career would have on
someone. Some of the animals that come into his office don’t end up getting better and that

2. would be a hard thing to deal with. After this interview I realize that it takes a certain kind of
person to be able to have this career. I took away a lot of useful information from this interview,
for example if I am thinking about going into this field I should start volunteering at an animal
hospital soon. This will help to see if this is something I am actually interested in or not. I was
strangely happy to hear Dr. Coleman say this was not what he always thought he was going to be
doing. He wanted to be a piolet, but then found out he was color blind which means he would not
be able to fly a plane. I am struggling to find out what I want my future career to be. It made me
feel better that he went from wanting to be a piolet to being a vet. Those two careers are very
different from each other. I think that this is a great example of you don’t know where life is
going to take you. Hearing him say this made me feel better about questioning my career path. I
may not know what I want to do right now, but hopefully in the end everything will work out
like in Dr. Coleman’s case. If I were to do a different interview with someone else I would ask
them the same questions. I think the questions I came up with were good questions to get the
information I was looking for. On the other hand next time I interview someone about their
career I would like to do it in person, rather than over the phone. This is because I think I could
get more information out of a person if we were talking face to face. This would also make the
interview more personal which would be better for networking. I think this interview was very
helpful and I would like to do it again. Next time I would like to have the opportunity to
interview someone who works with training seeing eye dogs and pairing them up with people.
This is another career path I am considering and would like more information on.