When I say that I am going to medical school in 2028, I do not mean that I am leaving veterinary medicine behind. I mean almost the opposite. Veterinary training gave me my first language for anatomy, physiology, reproduction, disease, welfare, and the responsibility that comes with touching a living body. Medical school is the next clinical language I want to learn, but it is not a replacement for the first one.
The temptation, when telling a story like this, is to make it sound inevitable. It was not. I did not begin veterinary school with a perfectly designed physician-scientist narrative in mind. I began with animals, with clinical training, with the discipline of learning what a body is before it becomes an abstraction. Later, through graduate research in theriogenology and reproductive biotechnology, I found myself returning again and again to a larger question: how can knowledge generated through animal research become useful for medicine without losing sight of the animal in front of us?
That question has shaped much of my work. Porcine oocytes, embryo culture, semen cryopreservation, genome-edited animal models, and CRISPR-based epigenetic editing can sound like separate technical subjects. In the laboratory they often are separate tasks, divided by protocol, reagent, assay, and deadline. But underneath them is a common concern: how living systems develop, fail, recover, and become legible enough for us to intervene responsibly.
A route through veterinary science
Veterinary medicine teaches comparison as a habit. A clinician trained around animals cannot assume that one species is simply a smaller or larger version of another. Similarities matter, but so do differences in anatomy, physiology, metabolism, behavior, reproduction, and environment. That habit of comparison is one of the things I want to carry into human medicine.
It also teaches a certain kind of pragmatism. Animal health is rarely separated from management, housing, nutrition, economics, public health, and welfare. A clinical problem is never only a cellular problem, and a cellular result is never automatically a clinical solution. Working in veterinary settings makes this obvious. It keeps the body connected to the world around it.
In reproductive biotechnology, this connection is especially clear. A protocol for in vitro maturation is not just a laboratory recipe. It is a claim about what an oocyte needs. A semen cryopreservation system is not just a storage method. It is a way of protecting genetic potential across time. A genome-edited porcine model is not just a technical product. It is an experimental responsibility, because the animal is both a model and a living being.
Why medical school still matters
If veterinary research has given me the comparative and experimental foundation, medical school is where I hope to build the clinical counterpart. I have been admitted and will matriculate in 2028, so this period is not a waiting room. It is a consolidation period. I want to use it to finish the arc of my PhD work, continue postdoctoral research, build public-facing veterinary projects, and become clearer about the kind of clinician-scientist I want to become.
The word translation is used often enough that it can become decorative. For me, it remains concrete. Translation is the work of asking whether an animal model truly answers the human question that motivated it. It is asking whether a molecular intervention survives the complexity of a living organism. It is asking whether a promising result has been validated enough to move one step closer to patients. It is also asking what ethical obligations appear at each step.
Medicine will not erase those questions. It will sharpen them. I want to understand disease from the side of the patient as well as from the side of the model. I want to learn how clinical uncertainty feels when the person affected by it is sitting across from you. I want to see where laboratory ambition meets the limits and urgency of actual care.
The bridge is the work
Large-animal research forces humility. A pig is not a mouse scaled up, and it is not a human being in disguise. It is a living system with its own biology, constraints, and welfare needs. That is exactly why porcine models matter. They let us ask questions that are closer to human physiology while still demanding that we respect the animal as more than a proxy.
This is also why reproductive biotechnology has felt like the right place for me to begin. Oocytes, embryos, semen, and edited animal models are technical subjects, but they are also threshold subjects. They sit near the beginning of life, inheritance, experimental design, and future therapies. The work asks for care before it asks for confidence.
I want to carry three habits into medicine: the veterinarian's instinct to compare across species, the researcher's patience with uncertainty, and the clinician's obligation to make knowledge useful for someone in front of you. If those habits can live together, then the path from veterinary science to human medicine is not a detour. It is the point.