The majority of Texas A&M veterinary students go on to careers in general practice, but some become so enthralled with specific branches of medicine that they decide to dedicate their entire careers to that field.

Such is the case with Annalis Cigarroa, Maria Granello, and Hunter Enderle, who plan to take their professional aspirations to the next level after completing their Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degrees by pursuing years of additional training and hands-on experience that will allow them to earn board certification in a high-demand veterinary specialty.

Becoming “boarded” in one of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 41 recognized specialties means specialty candidates must complete a one-year internship and a residency program that can span up to three years; publish original research; and pass additional examinations.

This type of training substantially deepens the veterinarian’s knowledge and skill set. “I loved medicine since I was a child, but then I also figured out that I loved surgery in our junior surgery course. I didn’t want either of them to be exclusive,” Cigarroa said. “I think neurology is the perfect specialty that combines medicine and surgery. I also like that for a large portion of the patients we see, some of the surgeries truly can restore the animal.”

A Passion For South Texas

Cigarroa is proud of her hometown, Laredo, and that pride has influenced her decision to pursue a veterinary specialty.

“Laredo is a really unique city because there is such a blend of Mexican and American culture,” she said. “Everywhere you go, every restaurant and shop you walk into, you’ll be spoken to in English and in Spanish. As a result, there’s a Laredo accent, Laredo sayings, and other things that are just unique to border life.”

However, this booming city, which is the top trade port in the nation, has a healthcare deficit in specialty veterinary medicine.

“The closest specialty practice in South Texas is in San Antonio (more than 150 miles away),” said Cigarroa, who grew up with many foster pets and rode quarter horses in cutting events. “There are so many growing cities like Laredo, McAllen, and even Corpus Christi that don’t have close access.”

Cigarroa’s interest in medicine was piqued as a child by her father, who is a human cardiologist. “I always had a love for medicine,” she said. “It just wasn’t until later in my (undergraduate) studies that I decided it was a love for veterinary medicine and not human medicine.”

The fourth-year student, who entered the DVM program with a degree in science pre-professional from Notre Dame, hopes to combine her passion for animals, medicine, and the Texas border region to build a bilingual practice that specializes in small animal neurology in her hometown.

“I’m interested in bringing specialty medicine further into South Texas,” she said. “I hope within the next 10 years there can be a shift, whether that’s just providing some aspect of specialty care in South Texas or coming up with a way to bring specialty medicine in just one area and having it serve a greater population.”

Equine-imity

Horses are an integral part of Granello’s life.

As a young girl, she started competing in eventing, an equestrian sport similar to a triathlon, and then continued her passion as a member of the varsity equestrian team at Sewanee: The University of the South.

Now Granello wants to pursue a profession that will allow her to work with these animals—which has led her to commit to specializing in equine sports rehabilitation.

“I always want to keep horses in my life and then I found that veterinary medicine is a really great way to be engaged every day with both horses and the people who love and care for them like I do,” she said.

The native of Dallas, who holds an undergraduate degree in biology and a chemistry minor from Sewanee, believes the CVM’s program provided a solid and comprehensive veterinary foundation.

“Even though I’m an equine track, we get exposed to everything at A&M, which I think makes us more well-rounded,” she said. “But I have really enjoyed my time on the equine rotations.”

Granello has completed four rotations focused on horses and three externships at equine referral hospitals across the nation. The next step on her professional journey is an internship at the prestigious Littleton Equine Medical Center in Denver.

Afterwards, she plans to pursue either a surgery or sports medicine residency, which will prepare her to work with horses that are worth millions of dollars.

“I’m really interested in performance horses and helping these horses reach athletic and performance potential,” Granello said. “I really respect and am interested in how to improve and keep them at peak form.”

She credits Texas A&M for preparing her to be successful in this fast-paced and high-pressure setting.

“I think that the CVM’s professors and clinicians are very encouraging and they really want you to succeed in your goals and your career,” Granello said. “I have felt like everyone here wants the students to succeed and be the best veterinarians they can coming out of this program.”

Try, Try Again

Enderle’s path to a veterinary medicine career took an unexpected detour when his first application to the CVM wasn’t accepted.

“That was a little bit of a heartbreaker for me,” said the Midlothian resident, who earned a biomedical sciences degree from Texas A&M in three years. “It was my first defeat in life.”

His initial interest in a career in veterinary medicine had been fostered by his passion for several academic subjects.

“It was my interest in math and science and then my love of animals,” he said. “These two interests came together and formed this veterinary medicine career path.”

Enderle’s unexpected gap year resulted in valuable hands-on experience. Returning home to regroup, Enderle accepted a job as a technician at a Dallas-area specialty veterinary hospital.

Over the next year, he was introduced to a number of sub-specialties—including internal medicine, emergency medicine, and oncology—and had the opportunity to work with CVM associate professor Dr. Ashley Saunders, who offered cardiology consultations in the Dallas area.

That experience led to his acceptance to the CVM’s veterinary medicine program and the development of a mentor relationship with Saunders. It also helped him realize that he wanted to pursue a specialty.

“I knew in my first year of vet school that cardiac physiology clicked for me,” he said. “It just made sense and I was good at it. Having worked in the specialty practice, I was drawn toward the more specialized part of being good at one thing.”

Enderle believes earning board certification in cardiology will prepare him to be successful in the middle ground between medicine and surgery.

“The cardiologists do a lot of interventional procedures, so they’re closing off patent ductus arteriosus; they’re doing a noninvasive procedure to fix a dog’s heart from a disease it was born with,” he said. “But then cardiologists also work with a lot of medications and medicine management of really complicated congestive heart failure cases. They work with imaging like echocardiograms. You see a good variety, but you also get really good at the things that are common.”

Ultimately, Enderle wants to return to the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

“Dallas is an underserved area for cardiology right now. I think there’s one cardiologist in the Dallas area,” he said. “For as many people that are there, it’s just not enough.”

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Note: This story originally appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of CVM Today.

For more information about the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, please visit our website at vetmed.tamu.edu or join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Contact Information: Jennifer Gauntt, Director of Communications, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences; jgauntt@cvm.tamu.edu; 979-862-4216

Jillian Villalva has always been fascinated with birds.

“As a kid, my parents would lose me when we were walking places because I would see some bird and want to follow it to figure out what it was doing,” said the fourth-year veterinary student.

Growing up in Portland, Oregon, the force that drew her to nature also instilled in her a love for all animals, and especially exotic birds, which have always held a special place in her heart.

“My grandfather was a woodsman and was really fascinated by birds,” she said. “I would go out walking with him and he would tell me about all of the different species; he knew all of them.

“Birds always just felt magical to me,” Villalva said. “They’re flighty and weird and you have to be quiet and sneak up on them, so when you get to be near one, you feel privileged, because it’s not something that people normally get to do. You feel very special when you work with them.”

When she decided to pursue her childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian, a career in avian medicine was the obvious choice.

Birds and other exotic animals typically require a sensitive touch and precise care to remain happy and healthy as pets. The veterinarian caring for these animals must understand the uniqueness of each species and know how to recognize the slightest changes in appearance or behavior.

“It’s just a completely different mindset of how you approach your patients,” Villalva said. “I like paying attention to the really tiny details and the long conversations that you end up having with owners.

“Exotic medicine is about connecting with the person and getting them on the right page, being excited about what they’re doing and happy because they feel like they know how to understand or bond with their animal,” she said. “That’s what makes me feel really fired up about medicine.”

To begin working toward a career in exotic medicine, Villalva studied ecology and conservation biology for her undergraduate degree at Boston University. She then moved south to Texas to be near her husband’s family and begin her veterinary education at Texas A&M.

In her third year as a veterinary student, Villalva had the opportunity to attend an educational abroad trip with CVM associate professor Dr. Donald Brightsmith. They traveled to Peru to continue his ongoing research on the scarlet macaw, a species that is experiencing declining numbers in the wild.

Brightsmith’s research focuses on macaw chick-rearing behavior, with an emphasis on finding ways to improve chick survival rates. Mother macaws typically lay multiple eggs over a period of time but only care for the chick that hatches first because it is the largest.

Through previous studies, Brightsmith discovered that by removing a chick and rearing it by hand, it could then be translocated to a different nest with a chick of the same size. After several days, the mother macaw would accept the new chick and begin feeding it along with her own chick.

As a veterinary student, Villalva was interacting directly with the chicks to assess their health, take measurements, and track their growth.

“It was the coolest thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “We walked around the jungle, climbed 100- to 150-foot trees in the Amazon, and played with baby macaws.

“I really loved the collaboration between all of the scientists there, because everyone was coming from a different background with slightly different focuses,” she said. “It was this huge collaboration of minds all coming together to solve problems and think about things critically.”

After graduation, Villalva plans to begin a practice route specialization in avian and exotic medicine. This method of specialization involves writing case reports while working in a clinic, and then submitting those reports for a chance to take an exam for board certification.

She then plans to open her own clinic somewhere in Texas and spend every day caring for the birds and other exotic animals she loves.

“Texas is so unique in that it has this private sector of exotic medicine,” Villalva said. “With most places in the rest of the country, when you want to do exotics, you have to do public medicine—at a zoo, a rehab center, or something that’s run by the state—so the medicine is really different.

“When I came here, I was excited to see opportunities in private exotic medicine that had the patients I’ve loved forever and the type of medicine that I love,” she said.

With a strong passion for such a unique area of veterinary medicine, Villalva is sure to have an exciting career ahead of her full of the animals she has been fascinated with for her entire life.

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Note: This story originally appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of CVM Today.

For more information about the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, please visit our website at vetmed.tamu.edu or join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Contact Information: Jennifer Gauntt, Director of Communications, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences; jgauntt@cvm.tamu.edu; 979-862-4216

Unlike with many of his peers, veterinary medicine wasn’t Timothy Turner’s first career choice.

“I wanted to be an astronaut first, but when I was 10, I was fishing with my grandpa, and we found a big piece of metal in Lake Nacogdoches,” he said. “We started asking around to find out what it could be and learned that it might be a piece of the Space Shuttle Columbia that had blown up several years earlier. That cured me of ever wanting to fly to space.”

While the Douglas, Texas, native got what he might believe to be a “late” start in veterinary medicine—considering that he would complete his homeschool curriculum and enter Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA) at 14—he began focusing the same energy and attention that were preparing him for a career in astrophysics into veterinary apprenticeship, shadowing under the watchful eye of Dr. Jim Weatherly ’80.

“After a year or two, Dr. Weatherly really started to notice that my interest was shifting from just, ’I love animals’ to really paying attention to and loving the work in medicine, especially with large animals,” Turner said. “So, he really took me under his wing. He pushed me and made me see what I would be doing in the future and how I can make the profession better. Even though he’s an old school veterinarian, he was always striving to make the profession better every single day.

“He taught me about veterinary medicine to the point that by the time I left there at 16 or 17 years old, he had begun joking, ‘You’re just going for a piece of paper now,’ because he gave me what knowledge he could in that time,” Turner said. “He basically is the reason I’m here today.”

At SFA, Turner studied animal science while working for Weatherly. When he wasn’t initially accepted into veterinary school at Texas A&M, he decided to stick around SFA and pursue degrees in chemistry and biochemistry. This ended up being fortuitous for Turner, as he met his wife (Meg, who is now a medical student at Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine in Fort Worth) in organic chemistry class.

Living apart while dating and then as a married couple presented its challenges; however, knowing that medical school was just a pit stop on the journey to a life together as doctors and the mutual understanding of the “grueling” nature of their curricula—along with conscious effort and FaceTime—have allowed the Turners to make it work.

It hasn’t hurt that their mutual love of medicine has brought them together in sometimes unexpected ways, such as when Meg’s cat, Charlie, ate a piece of string that became stuck in his intestines; because the cost of surgery was preclusive for medical students, the pair met at a family friend’s veterinary clinic, where, under the veterinarian’s watchful eye, Turner removed the foreign object.

“It was a great bonding moment, it saved her cat, and we got to be medically associated together,” Turner said. “It was just a really great experience.”

While Turner plans to devote his career primarily to bovine medicine, circumstances like that of Meg’s cat have also reinforced his love for small animal surgery.

“Charlie was very sick; in another couple of hours, he could have died, but we performed surgery for an hour and a half and he woke up happy, healthy, and ready to eat soft food. It’s just amazing, the turnaround surgery can have,” Turner said.

“A picture-perfect day in the life of Tim as a veterinarian would be spending three or four days a week out in the field working on cattle and then a couple of days locked away in small animal surgery,” he said. “Surgery is just very satisfying to me.”

That picture-perfect day would also include being back home in a small East Texas town, working at, and eventually owning, a mixed animal practice, with his wife also working at, or perhaps owning, a rural medicine practice.

Turner does admit that the concern among students about pay in rural communities, when associated with veterinary student debt, also concerns him, but, ultimately, his desire to help improve the veterinary situation in East Texas drives him to serve at home.

“I don’t necessarily think there’s a lack of large animal veterinarians in East Texas, but I don’t know that owners see the full value of our veterinary services. They can give their own antibiotics, they can buy a lot of vaccinations, they can de-horn—they can do a lot on their own,” Turner said. “Where veterinary medicine is having to shift is helping producers understand that our knowledge on nutrition, on selecting heifers, and other aspects of preventative medicine ultimately benefits the business.

“For example, if we select the cows that aren’t going to have problems calving, if I can get the number of calves that are getting stuck and having to be pulled down, then I help the producer. He’s not spending money on the dystocias; it takes less recovery time for the cow; the calf does better,” Turner said. “That’s something I’m going to have to actively go out and promote. I will have to be service-oriented and consult-oriented. So, yes, I am concerned about my debt, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable.”

That milk-glass-half-full mindset has driven Turner throughout his educational experience—whether it was learning the minutia of cattle medicine to provide services that he knows he’ll soon have to do on his own or the hard work it’s taken to get him where he is, Turner has simply enjoyed the ride.

“I really overworked myself that last year of undergrad, and so during veterinary school, I have made it a point to find the joy of what I’m doing each and every day,” Turner said. “I’ve always wanted to be an Aggie, ever since I was little, and I think a lot of it was Dr. Weatherly’s pride in the school. He was always proud of his ring and has worn it every day of his life since he’s gotten it.

“When I sit down and think about it, I’ve enjoyed every minute of veterinary school,” he said. “I know that it’s not a very common opinion, but if you told me that I had to start back from day one in order to be a veterinarian, I would do it all over again. I really would.”

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Note: This story originally appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of CVM Today.

For more information about the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences, please visit our website at vetmed.tamu.edu or join us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Contact Information: Jennifer Gauntt, Director of Communications, Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences; jgauntt@cvm.tamu.edu; 979-862-4216