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During our investigation, we have carried out a research about the burnout syndrome among the students of the University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest, which is part of a larger research series assessing the mental hygiene of hungarian veterinarians. The main goal of the thesis was to measure, how the students’ attitudes change towards their studies, themselves, and people around them. The online questionnaire we have processed, which was filled out by 353 students, consisted of 81 questions, of which we used a total of 15. The answers to the dichotomous (yes-no) questions were analysed with the Cochran–Armitage test, for the remaining questions, Kendall’s tau rank correlation coefficient was used. The questions were divided thematically into five groups, which were as follows: „Motivation during studies at the university”, „Emotional exhaustion due to demads”, „Depersonalization and cynicism”, „Low sense of Personal Accomplishment” and „Stress relief methods, coping strategies”. This division follows the three dimensional grouping scheme used in academic literature.

Seeing the results, students show increasing signs of burnout as they progress through the semesters. Family support is decreasing, and the attitude towards the university community shows more and more negative signs over the years. Based on the answers, students have less energy to carry out daily tasks, their ability to concentrate deteriorates, and have less and less time to themselves. Each year more students in higher grades would choose other studies if they had the chance to make a decision with their present minds and a significant proportion of them have already seriously considered changing universities. In parallel, the number of people who would not recommend this course to their friends has increased. A growing number of students in higher grades think, that their future is not sufficiently secured, while the number of people going to psychologists is steadily increasing.

In summary, we can state, that a significant percentage of the veterinary students suffer from burnout syndrome, and this trend is getting worse over the years. These results have shown that there is a great need for various prevention programs starting from the first years of university. These could help students to maintain their mental health not only during their years of study, but also after graduation, when they start working as veterinarians.