A high schooler from Raleigh stands in front of a poster board at NC State's veterinary college, explaining to a room of faculty that she spent five weeks testing the olfactory abilities of adult and senior dogs.
She's talking about developing diagnostic tools for aging pets. She's also talking about a career path she didn't know existed until this summer.
The Program NC State Just Committed to Running Again
NC State's College of Veterinary Medicine ran a pilot this summer called VetRISE, Veterinary Research Internship for Scientific Exploration. Eleven North Carolina high school students spent five weeks embedded in research labs with faculty mentors. They worked on antimicrobial resistance data, canine gait analysis, olfaction testing. They presented posters at the end. The college called it a success in every category and committed to offering it again next summer.
Dr. Margaret Gruen, the board-certified veterinary behaviorist who led the program's creation, said the students were amazing, the mentors were incredible, and the posters the students put together about their research were impressive. The college learned what it can do better next year.
One student, working in Gruen's lab, helped test whether a pressure-sensitive walkway could diagnose osteoarthritis in dogs as well as an X-ray. Another crunched years of hospital data and found that staph infection had a 41% resistance rate in canine patients, while E. coli had a 17.5% resistance rate in feline patients. A third worked on the olfaction study, looking for ways to measure functional ability so a decline could flag disease early.
The Student Who Thought She Couldn't Be a Vet
The student presenting the olfaction work, a Sanderson High School attendee named Georgoulias, said she always had a passion for caring for animals but that a weak stomach led her to believe she could never pursue veterinary medicine as a career.
Then she found out about VetRISE.
"It was really cool for me to find out about this research opportunity, which isn't so gory but is still helping them," she said. "I'm confident that I can see myself working in a research lab now where I can still work hands-on with animals, which is my favorite part."
She worked closely with two current NC State veterinary students who were interning in Gruen's lab as part of the college's Veterinary Scholars Program. More than 70 veterinary students spent their summer conducting research in NC State labs. Georgoulias said the vet students felt like coworkers or friends, always willing to answer questions or point her toward resources.
"Whenever people would ask me what I'm doing this summer, I would tell them about this, and every time, they were like, 'Wow, that's so cool! I didn't know you could do that,'" she said. "And I was like, 'Yeah, I didn't, either, but now I do.'"
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What the Mentors Didn't Expect
Dr. Cristina Lanzas, professor of infectious diseases, mentored a student from the NC School of Science and Math in Morganton who worked with Python and hospital antimicrobial resistance data. Lanzas admitted that she and the graduate students in her lab were a little leery of mentoring a high school student.
"From Day One, it was very clear that he was somebody who was very eager to learn quickly," Lanzas said. "We are quite impressed with what he's been able to do in just a few weeks."
The student, Mehta, said participating in VetRISE helped cement his interests in pharmaceutical research and anesthesia and taught him perseverance. He hopes to be a physician. He noted that Python coding gave him headaches, but being able to see all of his research on the final poster was rewarding.
Another student, Malapati, who attends the NC School of Science and Math online and plans to be a veterinarian, worked on the gait-analysis study. She said she had been struck by how much the researchers cuddled the dogs in the study. Her conclusion: the pressure-sensitive walkway could serve as a good alternative to X-rays, which are invasive and require sedation.
The Unasked Hiring Question
NC State's VetRISE program worked as designed. Eleven high schoolers got exposure to veterinary research, impressed their mentors, and walked away with new career perspectives. One learned she could work with animals without surgery. Another got hands-on experience with clinical data analysis. A third discovered that research labs involve a lot of dog cuddling.
The college is running it again next year.
What the press release doesn't address: whether funneling high schoolers toward research careers before they even apply to vet school helps or hurts the associate shortage a practice owner will face in 2030. Georgoulias found a path that keeps her in veterinary medicine without the gore. That's a win for her and for the profession's research capacity. Whether it's a win for the practice trying to hire a second associate in five years is a different question, and one the pipeline programs don't ask.
The profession talks about associate shortages. Vet schools fund programs that highlight non-clinical paths. The incentives don't line up, and nobody's tracking whether early-exposure programs that emphasize research over practice are steering future DVMs away from the exam room at the recruitment stage, before debt, before burnout, before any of the mid-career factors we spend so much time measuring.
NC State's program succeeded. The students learned. The mentors were impressed. The posters were good. The question worth asking: what does 'success' mean when the goal is exposure and the profession needs bodies in GP?