Lidia's choice was emotional, but also practical. “When I heard about it,” she says, “I thought wow, it almost feels like home.”

For years, vocational education in Moldova has struggled with low attractiveness and weak prestige. Between 1990 and 2014, the number of vocational students dropped about four times.

At the Brătușeni college, only 70 students studied by the late 1990s, according to the director, Ghenadie Frecăuțanu. Now, there are around 400.

This growth converges students’ experience with the country’s future. Moldova’s vocational education reform is trying to move training closer to real work, employers, and local needs.

When fear turns into concentration

At the college, Lidia discovered that loving animals is not enough. The work demands discipline and the ability to read pain. “Animals cannot speak,” she says. “We have to understand the disease from symptoms and behaviour and somehow feel their pain in order to save them.”

Practice is what gives those skills weight. In the college clinic and at the small farm, Lidia has assisted teachers during veterinary procedures, helped with instruments, and learned how much precision animal care requires. She remembers the fear around holding a scalpel and the moment when fear turned into concentration.

“Practice changed me a lot,” she says. “It gave me much more confidence in myself.”

Not every lesson confirms that gently. One case that stayed with Lidia was a puppy brought to the clinic too late. By the time the animal arrived, nothing could be done. “It left a mark on my soul,” she says.

That, too, became part of her training: not only learning how to treat, but coming to understand how to live with the delay, hesitation, and loss inherent to the profession.

A sustainable model with Swiss support

In Brătușeni, that shift toward practical education is visible through the college’s own clinic, laboratory, and farm work. Frecăuțanu says around half of the training is practical, and that the old theory-heavy ratio no longer works.

The clinic sits at the centre of that shift. Established with support of CREATIVO project, funded by Switzerland and Lichtenstein, it was never meant to be just a modern addition to the campus, explained Olga Pilipciuc, head of the program at Centre for Entrepreneurial Education and Business Support (CEDA), the organization that implements the initiative.

The clinic does several things at once: improves students’ training, keeps teachers professionally sharp, provides real veterinary services to the region, and helps the college generate income instead of relying only on state funding.

“Success does not depend on the type of diploma, but on real skills and practical experience,” Pilipciuc believes.

Steady reality and a secured future

The impact of Brătușeni college is visible not only in current students, but in those who have already left. Years ago, Frecăuțanu says, direct employment after graduation was very low. Today, more Brătușeni graduates go straight into work, while many others continue to higher education with a stronger practical base. Nationally, dual education has shown stronger labour-market results: in 2022, Moldova’s Ministry of Education said that more than 70% of graduates of dual programmes are employed immediately after completing their studies. Some of the graduates open their own practices after graduation.

Some graduates have opened clinics in Bălți, Orhei, and Telenești. Others work in clinics in Chișinău or abroad.

“A graduate should be better than me,” Frecăuțanu says. “Otherwise, I didn’t deserve my bread.”

He mentions that former students stay in touch with the college and help teachers understand what should be added to the curriculum. Some return with masterclasses. One graduate, now working in Chișinău, comes back with his own equipment to show students and teachers practices the college does not yet fully cover, such as veterinary dentistry.

Frecăuțanu gives us a tour of the college. In one classroom full of youngsters in white coats and hats, another student, Igor Lîsîi, looks through a microscope to find parasites. He sees veterinary medicine as part of “a better future” not only for animals, but for people too: healthier animals mean fewer diseases, safer food, and better protection for communities.

For Lidia Cozac, this future is more personal. Lidia still connects her current choice to the animals she grew up with at home, especially cats and one in particular. “Since childhood, and even now, my favourite animals have been cats. I have many cats at home, and in my first year I had a tomcat named Felix – in Latin, that means happy. I lost him when he was one year old, and that left a very deep mark on my soul. I also like little goats; we have goats at home, and I often play with them when I go back,” she tells us with a smile.

“In my family, I was the first one who decided to go further with my studies after school,” Lidia continues. At college, a course in entrepreneurship pushed her to think not only about treating animals, but also about what it takes to build something of her own: a business plan, a market, clients, competitors.

She explains that the college showed her that after graduation there are “many open doors”: clinics, veterinary pharmacies, zoos, and food safety. “That was when I thought I would like to open my own clinic,” Lidia says. And she wants to do it somewhere in northern Moldova, where she says there is still no modern specialized clinic with all the facilities she would want to see.

Before Brătușeni, that idea would have sounded too distant.

Now, it feels possible.