Real Farmwives of America: How did I get here?

My friend Heather over at 3 Kids and Lots of Pigs has been doing weekly feature, Farmer Fridays.  This week she’s starting something a little different.   A bunch of us “farmwives” are joining up to tell you about our lives!  This is the first Real Farmwives of America joint post.  Look for more to come in the future!

So, today’s topic…  How did I get here?

I have a long story.  I’ll try to keep it simple.

I grew up in suburban New Jersey, with not a cow in sight.  I went to vet school at The Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, in Massachusetts.  I got to drive by a small herd of Belted Galloway cows every day, and just got a kick out of that.  Seriously, these cows look like giant Oreo cookies, and I love it!

During vet school I got some exposure to livestock, and just had a blast with the large animals.  I had always known that I wanted to work on horses, but the other livestock were starting to have an effect on me as well.  I did a one-year internship at a referral clinic in New Hampshire where I decided that I wanted to focus on Large Animal Medicine.

Now, most vets, when they graduate from vet school go into private practice and are done with school.  Technically, we are qualified to work on anything from a goldfish to an elephant.  I decided that I wanted to specialize in internal medicine (specifically large animal internal medicine), so I needed some more training to get the specialty certification.  There are only a limited number of training programs in the United States, and each of these programs has, at most, one spot open each year.  This is a very competitive program to get into (although not as competitive as surgery).

Similar to how this works in the human medical fields, the veterinary specialty programs have a matching system to match applicants with programs.  I won’t bore you with the details, let’s just end this part of the story by saying that I got matched to an Internal Medicine residency at Purdue University, in Lafayette, Indiana.

This is where I met my husband, although I didn’t know that was going to happen!  He was finishing his last year of vet school as I was starting the first year of my residency.  Now, I had no plans to stay in Indiana at the end of my three-year program, but he sure changed my mind!!

After John was finished with vet school at Purdue, he moved back to his hometown and joined his father’s mixed-animal vet practice.  They work on large animals and small animals and everything in between (no monkeys, please). 

John and his dad already had a small beef cattle farm, and they worked on expanding it a bit once he moved back.  John bought a small farm house on some land (which we use for pasture and hay), with a giant barn.
We got married a little over a year ago, and I moved to rural southern Indiana and magically became a farmwife.  We live in the small house with the giant barn.  And, although I never in a million years pictured myself having this type of lifestyle, I have to say that waking up to this every morning sure makes me happy!

Be sure to check out the other Real Farmwives today!

• Heather 3 Kids and Lots of Pigs 
• Amy & Liz at 2 Maids A Milking
• Amy at A Latte with Ott, A.
• Leah at Beyer Beware
• Jeanette at Fence Row to Fence Row
• Lauren at Four Ransoms and a Farm
• Cris at GOODEness Gracious
• Meggie at Hoosier Farm Babe
• Jent at My Front Porch
• Katie at On the Banks of Squaw Creek
• Whitney at Life is a Highway and Mine’s Surrounded By Corn
• Lana at Walking the Off-Beaten Path
• Denise at Who is the Grown Up?
• Jane at Going Jane
• Jennifer at Farmgirl Follies

(by the way, watch for the return of Farm Equipment Fridays here next week!)