MARSHALL — Over the holiday break, Kayla Sawchak did a brief externship with the Marshall Animal Clinic as she readies to graduate in May from vet school.

“Externships can be anything that the doctors are comfortable with me doing and I’m comfortable doing so I did general appointments. I did a surgery. I went on phone calls. It’s just basically assisting the doctor in their day and learning alongside them,” she said.

Growing up in Marshall, Sawchak came to love all animals especially horses and she knew from a young age that she wanted to be a veterinarian. In fact, she originally went to North Dakota State University in Fargo as a pre-vet major but one of the introductory classes had a life-altering and unexpected impact on her.

“They had a large animal doctor come in and give a spiel on large animal medicine and stuff like that,” Sawchak said. “At the end of her little presentation, she said, ‘If I have any advice for you guys it is don’t go to vet school. It’s a waste of time and your money and you’re going to be miserable.’ I was 17 at the time so I was like this lady knows more than me so I called my mom that day and I told her I’m not supposed to be in school and had a little existential crisis, but I found social work.”

For six years in fact, Sawchak was a social worker in a halfway house dealing with and managing a caseload of federal inmates who were coming out of the prison system. Of that that experience, she said it was interesting and there was never a dull moment but she was feeling drained and looking for something else.

“I learned a lot about people and how to have very different conversations and very difficult conversations, but ultimately they’re no different than us,” Sawchak explained. “They just made some mistakes along the way. They’re trying to make themselves better. I felt really burnt out from that career and I tried to put animal assisted therapy into my social work but it got kind of pushed aside and it didn’t seem like the Federal Bureau of Prisons were really gung-ho for it as I was. When they said, ‘No, you’re not going to be able to put this program into play,’ I was like why don’t I just go back to school for what I want do because I was always kind of disappointed in myself that I didn’t even try for veterinary medicine.”

So that was exactly what she did. She enrolled at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and will graduate in a few months. Upon her graduation, she will move back to North Dakota where she has accepted a veterinarian position. Unlike that speaker in her pre-vet program all those years ago, Sawchak said she did not find vet school to be futile.

“It hasn’t been waste of time,” Sawchak said. “It has definitely been harder than I thought it would be. I don’t regret making my decision of not doing it right away because I look at my classmates who haven’t been out in the world and don’t really know anything except high school to college to vet school. I feel like I have a little bit more experience under my belt and I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that school as a 21 year old. I think I would have failed to be honest.”

To an extent, Sawchak will be able to put her social work experience to good use in her new job. Those experiences gave her new insight into the world and honed her interpersonal skills making it very easy to have a conversation with pretty much anyone from any type of background including pet owners.

“I used to have conversations with guys about them using again and after years of being sober, you messed up so many times, we have to send you back to prison,” Sawchak said. “So conversations where I’m telling people we should really spay and neuter your dog, this will give your pet a very happy life feels very benign to the conversations that I was having before. But I feel like I now know how to interact with people and make them comfortable in an exam room setting.”

In her externship with Marshall Animal Clinic and going forward as a veterinarian, Sawchak said her approach to her animal clients is gentleness, patience, slow movements, and interpreting nonverbal communication like body language to help minimize the animal’s fear and anxiety.

“I like to be super calm,” she said. “There are always different personalities when you meet animals just like with people. I like to use baby voices and pet the animals not even doing medical things and treating them like a pet before treating them like a patient. Looking at them and knowing that somebody loves them very, very much to bring them to me and entrusting me in taking care of them.”

Looking back at her 17 teenage self, Sawchak wouldn’t change a thing about how her path has turned out.

“The biggest takeaway that I’ve gotten from vet school is that there’s absolutely no way I can learn everything in school,” Sawchak said. “I’m going to be a lifelong learner in the clinic where I will be working and be given a case that I’ve never seen before or I’ve only heard about through one lecture. I’m going to have to make sure that I’m always willing to learn and be on top of things to be able to take care of my patients the way that they deserve.”

Sawchak is thrilled about graduating in the spring but is not entirely sure how she is going to celebrate — visiting Chicago or Japan. For now, though, she will celebrate the hard work and sacrifices she has made to become a veterinarian and looks forward to officially becoming a veterinarian and helping as many animals and pet owners as possible.

“I think I needed to give myself that time to kind of live my life and see what is all out there and to come back to something that I really actually wanted to do,” she said of deciding not to pursue vet school the first time around. “My big goal was to prove to myself that I could go back to school and to become a veterinarian, and I did that, so I’m kind of riding on that high right now.”