Hello all!
I’m your 2021 AAEVT President and I’m so excited to see what this year has in store for us! Yes, I’m actually excited, because, like most of you, I enjoy a challenge. COVID-19 may be the most unusual challenge that most of us have faced, but it’s a challenge nonetheless and I think it gives us an opportunity to shine. We, as technicians, assistants and support staff, can really show our adaptability and ingenuity in helping all of our practices to come up with the best ways to adapt to an ever-changing business model.
Let me back up just a little and introduce myself…I live on the beautiful Central Coast of California and work in internal medicine. Aside from a few small animal vet clinic jobs growing up, my real tech career started at Alamo Pintado Equine Medical Center following graduate school. A friend told me about her incredible medicine vet at Alamo who I just HAD to meet and I shortly found myself with a job in the ICU! Working in a busy referral hospital with amazing people taught me SO much but after having my daughter, the unpredictable schedule of the ICU was going to be tough to mesh with being a new mom. The same incredible medicine vet that I started with at Alamo had also become a mom and started a small, niche mobile internal medicine practice and wanted my help. So, I went from a hospital setting to a field setting with Riviera Equine Medicine and Consulting and I feel that it has been invaluable in regards to understanding both sides of our profession. Working in a hospital and working in the field are drastically different but similar to the front office and back in any practice, the two go hand in hand and each have their strengths. The trick is knowing what you do well and doing it, while developing productive and positive relationships with those who do the things that you don’t do.
Outside of veterinary medicine, I am a mom (which means that I’m now a school teacher as well!), run my own long term equine layup and retirement business on our ranch and help my husband run our construction business. And in my “free time,” we rope and brand calves with our Quarter Horses and since I didn’t have enough to do, I decided to jump into 3-day eventing and learn a whole new discipline! I’m now the proud owner of an OTTB and a Belgian WB and am completely addicted to running cross country!
We’re all busy with life but I squeezed one more thing in because I felt it was so important and that was taking on a role in the AAEVT! I started as a Regional Contact (RC) and stepped out of my comfort zone by being a case study presenter at our annual AAEP/AAEVT convention several years ago and in doing so, I met some truly incredible AAEVT members and my involvement has snowballed since! It’s easy to get bogged down in our day-to-day grind but I’ve found that in getting involved with this organization, I discovered a greater level of professionalism and network of resources that have opened a whole new world of opportunities! My goal this year is continuing the work of the AAEVT boards before me and continuing to raise the bar for the level of professionalism that we conduct ourselves with and showing our AAEP counterparts how valuable we are, especially when we work together. Cheers to 2021 and I hope to see lots of you IN PERSON this year!
