Ever since she was a little girl, Andrea Russell has dreamed of being a veterinarian, partly because she enjoys interacting with animals and partly because she believes they deserve a voice.
“I’m a huge animal rights believer,” says Andrea, a junior biology major and chemistry minor from Athens, Ohio. “They don’t have a voice to speak for themselves. They live their lives loving us, so we need to give back to them.”
In her quest to become a veterinarian, Andrea has taken on a job that’s giving her exceptional hands-on experience and valuable career prep. She works two nights a week and some weekends, alongside Dr. Mark Reineck and his associate, Dr. David Smith, and the vet techs at the Fremont Animal Hospital.
“I get to do the same things as the vet techs,” Andrea explains. These tasks include running blood work on the hospital’s patients, giving medications and injections and performing laser treatments on dogs with arthritis. “I even got to scrub in on a cruciate ligament surgery on a dog, which was pretty cool,” she says.
In addition to learning veterinary techniques and providing care for the animals, Andrea’s knowledge and skills are put to the test by Dr. Reineck, and that’s a good thing. “He challenges me with questions that really prompt me to think scientifically,” she says.
For her career, Andrea has her sights set on working with small animals. She’s getting great experience on campus as a volunteer in the Longaker Animal Lab, even planning a research project – an observational study with enrichment of the lab’s subjects – for her Honors Anatomy class.
With her well-rounded experience, Andrea will be well positioned to provide great care as well as a voice to the animals she loves when she enrolls in graduate school and beyond that, in her career. She understands how her job and volunteer work play into that.
“It’s important to get good grades, but getting outside experience, actually being involved in the medicine and not just learning it from a book and then applying it in a vet setting … that’s going to be really valuable,” she says.