91探花

When she first decided she wanted to pursue a career as a veterinarian, senior Rachel Stephenson didn’t know that veterinary medicine for wildlife was an option. Now, working with wildlife is her number-one career goal.

“It’s definitely still an up-and-coming field within veterinary medicine, which is really fun to be a part of. Wildlife rehab itself is growing exponentially across the country, so it’s really fun to have watched that,” Stephenson, who is a Pre-Veterinary Medicine major earning a minor in Wildlife Rehabilitation, said. “I absolutely love wildlife conservation, so I want to be a veterinarian that works a lot with zoo animals and does a lot of conservation and research.”

As soon as she was able during her sophomore year, Stephenson got involved at the May Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, the college’s on-campus rehabilitation center where students work alongside professional veterinarians and wildlife rehabbers, learning from them in a real-world environment while caring for real patients.

Since first getting involved at the Center working only a few hours a week, Stephenson has only gotten more invested in her work there. After completing her summer clinical session in the summer between her sophomore and junior years, her commitment to wildlife medicine, and the time she spent at the Center honing her craft, skyrocketed. The following summer she returned to work as a summer mentor, coaching students who were undergoing their own summer clinical experience.

“Summer clinicals absolutely changed my life. Those 11 weeks, working 40 hours a week, hands-on, in the nitty gritty and working in surgeries with the vets, was so much fun,” Stephenson said.

Throughout all the hours spent in the Center feeding and caring for patients, assisting with surgeries, training ambassador animals, and everything in between, Stephenson has fallen in love with one particular species of bird: raptors.

Having never worked with a raptor prior to her time at Lees-91探花, Stephenson wasn’t quite sure what to expect. However, when she first started working with Captain—a red-tailed hawk who lives at the Center full-time as an animal ambassador—she became immediately fascinated by the beautiful and highly intelligent birds.

“I had never worked with a bird before working with him, and he's such a docile and calm bird to start on, which has been an absolutely phenomenal opportunity to learn about bird body language and how raptors interact with their surroundings,” she said. “He has gone through a few medical issues, so he’s kind of on the retired side of things unfortunately. I have since started working with one of our new ambassadors, Evie, the Harris's hawk, and she is top tier. An absolutely phenomenal bird. We got her about a year ago, and I was the first person to start working on her, and the only person until mid-summer last summer.”

Evie is 17 years old, and came to the Center from a falconer, meaning she was already highly trained from her background in hunting alongside humans. As a hunting bird, Evie was used to working with only one handler at a time, and Stephenson has been integral in retraining Evie and helping her get acclimated to the animal ambassador program at the college where multiple students work with each animal.

In addition to working with animals, Stephenson’s work at the Center has given her the opportunity to work as a mentor with other students in the college’s Pre-Veterinary Medicine, Wildlife Biology, and Wildlife Rehabilitation programs. She said that sharing her passion for wildlife medicine with other young professionals has been one of the most rewarding aspects of her time at Lees-91探花.

“The entirety of this program is so absolutely rewarding,” she said. “To get to release animals back into the wild and know that an animal that would have died from human causes—that’s typically what we’re aiming for, is to mitigate human-caused animal deaths—and help it not die of a human cause and release it back into nature to give it a second chance has been absolutely incredible.”

Following graduation, Stephenson plans to complete an internship at a small animal clinic as she prepares to achieve her ultimate goal of attending veterinary school. She said that the ample experience she has had working in a clinical setting and training with and caring for a wide variety of animal species has set her up for success as she takes her next step into the professional world.

“To feel like I have made a difference on this campus, and to feel like I am involved and a part of the running of this campus is absolutely insane. I came from somewhere where I really didn’t want to be known or in the spotlight. To be more out there and to be more well-known around campus is never somewhere where I thought I would be,” Stephenson said. “Things that I never ever thought I would get to do in my life like training a peregrine falcon, or doing surgery on a dove, or running around in the woods at one in the morning looking for salamanders, there is just so much life-altering stuff that I’ve done here.”