Hitting the ground running
Unique hands-on training at CVM helps alums like Dr. Sam Waddell, '23 DVM, MPH, enter the workforce with value to share
Unique hands-on training at CVM helps alums like Dr. Sam Waddell, '23 DVM, MPH, enter the workforce with value to share
Dr. Sam Waddell, '23 DVM, MPH, with one of several dairy herds she helps care for in California.
On a chilly November day in California’s Central Valley, Sam Waddell, ’23 DVM, MPH, sat surrounded by dairy employees, hoof knife in hand. Using a cadaver hoof, she walked through a type of care often overlooked in dairies: foot health.
Despite the disease affecting cow health and production, “California, for whatever reason, does not focus much on lameness as an issue,” Waddell says.
Waddell graduated from the University of Minnesota (UMN) College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM) just a year and a half ago. Today, her job is just as much about educating producers as it is treating animals.
“I like the idea of setting up systems to work well to prevent problems and not need emergency response all the time,” Waddell says.
Waddell grew up in the suburbs of St. Paul, often visiting family on a corn and soy farm in Wisconsin. The early experiences that shaped the person she is today were two-fold.
Her grandparent’s neighbors had a dairy and she remembers being excited whenever she got to visit. She also remembers spending hours mulling over projects with her dad and brother—both of whom are engineers.
“We spent a lot of time talking about how things worked and what the connecting pieces were,” Waddell remembers. She always liked biology more than other scientific disciplines and applied her engineering brain to animals.
“Veterinary medicine at its core is understanding how things work and how you can have things work better,” she says.
That landed her in dairy medicine and under the mentorship of Dr. Gerard Cramer, professor of dairy production medicine in the Department of Veterinary Population Medicine at CVM.
“Gerard Cramer is the lameness guy. You can say his name all over the country and people in the industry know who he is,” Waddell says, adding that this was true for multiple professors she learned from.
It’s that access to expertise, and setting students up to hone specialties themselves, that sets UMN apart from other schools.
“There are eight or nine of us that have a different expertise area, students here can get a really well-rounded education,” Cramer says.
Starting in their third year of school, students can start specializing in food animal production medicine. In their clinical year, they take advanced production medicine courses, including a four-week dairy production medicine rotation. They can also take specialized clinical rotations that are heavily focused on combining population medicine with single animal care––something that came naturally to Waddell once she entered the field.
“They can say, while I’m here taking care of this sick cow, let’s talk about lameness,” Cramer explains. “The U of M is really specialized within lameness. Students can take two rotations where they probably get the most exposure of any students in the country.”
Trimming, the skill Waddell recently taught to a group of producers, is a type of lameness prevention she learned as a student.
“If they take all the trimming rotations they get six days of hands-on trimming experience. That sets them up to have more knowledge than most vets working in the world,” Cramer says.
Being able to pick a specialized track within CVM allowed Waddell to learn from six months of food production exploration in her final year of school, four of which included specialized instruction on lameness among dairy cows.
“The success I found in the first year and a half out of school is really due to the rotations I did in my fourth year of vet school,” Waddell says.
California produces 20 percent of the nation’s milk, and 80 percent of the state’s milk cows are located in the Central Valley, where Waddell works for Mill Creek Veterinary Services, a mobile veterinary clinic that specializes in dairy production medicine.
On a typical workday, she visits one or two dairies, walking through pens to identify pregnant cows.
“It allows me to look at almost all the cows in the herd, and we are usually surveilling the cows’ health from behind. I am often looking at feet and the udders or assessing body condition,” she says. “That’s been a really great way to look at feet.”
Aside from checking legs and feet for lesions or warts, Waddell turns to digital records where almost all producers record incidents of lameness. This can tell her a lot about what might be happening and how to fix it, such as eliminating something that’s injured cows in the milking parlor and causing infected wounds.
“It’s been really cool to come out of school and have these niche things to contribute. I was able to provide valuable information to clients early on and as a new grad, during an uncomfortable period where the clients are usually teaching you as much as you are them,” Waddell says.