Senior Seminars: Background & History of Senior Seminars

Every fourth-year DVM student at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine is required to enroll in the 1-credit course, “Fourth-Year Seminar” (VTMED 5612).

This course:

"[g]ives the student the responsibility and opportunity of selecting and studying a disease entity on the basis of a case or series of cases, or to conduct a short-term, clinically oriented research project under the direction of a faculty member.  In either case, an oral report will be presented at a weekly seminar.  A written report is also submitted within 2 weeks after the seminar.  All participants are encouraged to foster an atmosphere in which discussion, exchange of ideas, and the airing of controversial opinions might flourish. Fourth year students and all faculty and staff members are also invited and encouraged to attend. ." (Class Roster - Fall 2024)

Offered in the fall and spring terms, the course is a required component of Clinical Rotations (Foundation Course VI). Students earn S-U grades only. 

Dr. Mary C. Smith is chair of the Senior Seminar Committee. 

First-, second-, and third-year students and all faculty and staff members are invited and encouraged to attend. 

How Senior Seminars Began

When a new curriculum was implemented in the fall of 1945, fourth-year students were required to take a credit course #202 called “Clinical Conferences."

“These conferences will be attended by all members of the fourth-year class and by staff members representing not only the clinical but the preclinical or basic sciences as well. Students will be required to present reports on their studies of selected cases from the clinics, and these will be criticized and discussed by the faculty members. In this way the special knowledge and viewpoints of the anatomist, biochemist, physiologist, pathologist, bacteriologist, and parasitologist, as well as that of the clinicians, will be brought to bear on problems of diagnosis and therapy." (New York State Veterinary College Announcement for 1947-1948 Sessions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1947, p. 32.)

However, it was not until 1949 that papers were prepared and submitted by most students in the fourth-year class. (Some of these early seminars lack author names and are thus listed as “anonymous”; also, in 1950 and 1951, several students authored more than one paper.

Since 1965, these papers and presentations have been known as Senior Seminars.