This is a long story, but one that fits this question perfectly, and one that I’ve been longing to tell. I really hope you read it.

---

I went to college without any idea of what career I was building towards. All I knew was that I liked science. While I originally thought I wanted to study chemistry, my chem 101 professor was horrible and I failed the class. Meanwhile I LOVED my bio 101 class, so I changed my major to biology. I still didn’t know what to do with the degree, I just took the classes that sounded interesting and honestly really half assed my effort in them.

Every summer I would come home to my parents and work delivering pizzas because it’s what would hire me. But after my junior year I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I went home for the summer with no job planned, and still no idea what I would do when I graduated the following year. My mom put her foot down and said that no adult son of hers would live under her roof without a job, so she reached out to people she knew and got me one.

I was put on a factory line for a cash register repair company. I was second in line. The first person would get a returned cash register and run some diagnostics to figure out if it had anything wrong electronically. Then he gave it to me. I would take out 8 screws, remove the plastic covering, and blow dust off with an air hose. Then I’d give it to the next person and the first guy would give me another cash register. Rinse and repeat. Eight hours a day, five days a week. That’s it. That’s the whole job. I’ve never been more miserable than when I held that job and it made made truly reflect on why I was in college and what I wanted out of life.

After about a month and a half working there, my cat came down with a bout of bloody diarrhea and I told my dad, saying he should take him to the vet. He told me that I was a grown man and needed to handle my own problems, so that Saturday I begrudgingly took my cat to the vet like the responsible adult I should have been. I arrived and was asked to wait as the doctor was behind on appointments, and I immediately noticed that the place seemed to be working on a skeleton crew. In the past I had thought briefly about applying to vet school after undergrad, but had written it off early in my college career because it seemed really hard and, at the time, I was content on coasting through school with minimal effort. But my factory job had put the fear of God into me over what would happen if I just kept coasting.

After a two hour wait I was finally seen by the doctor, and during the appointment I told him that I noticed they seemed under staffed and asked if they were hiring. It turns out they had just had someone quit unexpectedly the day before. I told them that I was most of the way through a biology degree and they asked if I could come in Monday for an interview, so I called out of work that next Monday. Even though I had no experience in veterinary medicine at all, they said they were willing to train me, so long as I was willing to put the effort in to learn. I went back to work at the factory on Tuesday and told them it was my last day, and I started my new job as a vet tech on Wednesday.

Immediately, I fell completely in love with the job. I worked the rest of the summer and they asked me to come back during my winter break. That job gave me a goal to strive for that I’d never had before, and with that motivation I went from a 2.4 cumulative GPA up to a 3.7 for both of my last two semesters. Unfortunately that effort was only enough to bring my overall GPA up to a 3.05, which is too low to really consider applying to vet school, so I went and completed a master’s in biology the bridge the gap. I continued to work at that same clinic part time through grad school, where I graduated with a 4.2 GPA, and then full time for a few years more while I applied several cycles in a row. Ultimately, I worked there for 6 years before I finally got accepted, not just to veterinary school, but to my #1 choice at that.

Fast forward four more years to today where I’m now in my final year of veterinary school. I’m on clinical rotations actually getting to work hands on with real patients, applying everything that I’ve learned over the past three years of education, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m only a few months away from internship applications opening up, and I’m already asking around for letters of recommendation so I can keep moving forward towards my even more recently found goal of becoming an orthopedic surgeon. And all this happened to me because one summer I decided I didn’t want to deliver pizza.