The coronavirus pandemic continues to pose a threat to the safety of people worldwide at present and for the foreseeable future. BVM&S programmes require 12 weeks of hands-on pre-clinical working experiences and students are responsible for their own travel and accommodation. Although students have been informed that pre-clinical EMS is temporarily on hold, the RCVS is keeping pre-clinical EMS requirements on the back-burner. As a result, students are risking  spreading the virus and infection to continue seeking placements during lockdown. The uncertainty of how pre-clinical EMS will need to be made up is causing some students who would otherwise shelter in place to seek out work placements. The concern over this has been compounded for many by the formal statement released on 7 April 2020: "The longer term impact on students currently in their first or second year is likely to be less than for those in the latter years of study; it may be that opportunities for pre-clinical EMS return at an earlier stage than for clinical EMS, as the farming industry continues to operate." The farming industry may continue, but student help should be on a completely voluntary basis, not for academic progress.

Our school administrators and the RCVS are no doubt working very hard during this tumultuous time amidst the rapidly changing coronavirus landscape to ensure that changes are made to keep students, faculty, and those we work with safe. Student input, however, remains vital in order to do so. The key factor in personal safety during this pandemic is social distancing. We as students are acutely aware of the requirements for EMS placements and the following suggestions would greatly improve our personal safety and reduce the growing pressure on the student body for completing programme requirements:

• Reopening EMS exemptions and eliminating the cap on how many weeks we are allowed to have exempt. This would lessen the pressure on students to make up requirements in an abbreviated time frame.
• Expanding the time period exemptions are allowed from one year prior to the start of classes to encompassing a student's lifetime of experience. This is especially considering plenty of us have previous degrees and careers that cannot be reflected in as short a time span such as one year prior.  
• Eliminating the requirement for 2 weeks of free choice and making this optional. With less time to complete pre-clinical EMS, free choice should not be mandatory. 
• Offer short EMS placements on school owned or affiliated farms to small groups of students when it is safe again to do so. This would ensure that we get some working exposure while minimizing disease risk due to unnecessary travel.
• Reduce any two-week placements to one week. This would ensure that students who do not have previous experiences that would fully exempt a requirement and who still need certain experiences can complete them in a more timely manner.

These suggestions are not simply to lessen the work load of pre-clinical students, they are to keep us safe so that we may be healthy and ready to work in the future. Although RCVS is a UK organization, the student body is a highly diverse international one. Given the uncertainty surrounding how long the pandemic will last, the variety of responses that governments in the home countries of students have had, and how those responses contribute to a variety of factors from hospitals' abilities to handle infection rates to students' income and housing security, the RCVS must go beyond baseline government recommendations to keep students safe. We understand that while not all of these suggestions may be implemented, we hope each item is seriously considered. Thank you for your consideration.