I am one of the lucky ones. When I was four, I said I wanted to be a veterinarian. I set the goal and then began doing the studies and the activities that would lead to that outcome. I graduated from Cornell University in 2005 with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, and it was one of the best days of my life.
It’s been 20 years, and I still find that I’m right where I should be careerwise. I experience flow constantly when I do medicine, surgery, and work with clients. There was that one setback in 1st grade, when I looked at the school calendar and thought, “Man, I’m never going to make it to 3rd grade.” It’s interesting how perspective changes with time. But aside from that, the simple wish and mission led to today.
While the story sounds simple and idyllic, the journey has resulted in multiple little “t” traumas along the way that have shaped me as a person, as a believer, as a veterinarian, and as a friend. I still grieve for many parts of my career that didn’t happen the way I had hoped. By the time I graduated, I could already see that a darkness was settling over my beloved career. A darkness of mental health, burn out, compassion fatigue, and suicide. I saw people suffering who also caused others within the field to suffer—the age-old “hurt people, hurt people”. I began actively looking into ways to improve my own mental health and kept hoping that the profession would find solutions.
When I couldn’t achieve one professional dream, I found my way into a PhD program where I learned that I could become a researcher to start studying the problems within my field. The PhD program ended up being a terrible experience, not because of the program, but because of the broken people and system that ran it. It made me more determined to study the system and see if I could do something.
When I graduated, I knew that I was going to switch the focus of my research from traumatic brain injury (that I had studied for my dissertation) and move into veterinary and animal well-being. But I had no idea where to start or how to begin. And I didn’t have a good grasp of where the field was at in this direction. I attended a professional leadership conference in my field where I hoped to get inspiration. Instead, I was shocked to find how many people had created their own LLCs so that they could address problems they saw in the veterinary field and monetize it for consulting services. I found that disheartening. GreenHouse offered a different path.
Doing GreenHouse forced me to truly articulate what type of research I wanted to do in my field. It required me to dig deep into why this mattered to me, what problems I could identify with the current solutions, and how I wanted to create something new. Instead of creating a consulting business from my research, I wanted to publish in peer reviewed literature so that everyone could access the information. It gave me my first real hope that this dream could become a reality. And most importantly, it helped me to realize how God has given me this vision and how he has given me the opportunity to impact my field with a God-centered focus.
Prior to this, my dream was a nebulous idea floating in my soul, lacking words to describe it. GreenHouse has helped me see that I need to approach this dream, not from a “What can I do to make this happen?”, but “How can I partner with the Triune God to birth this into the world?”. I didn’t realize how microscopic my view was initially as I focused on next steps before the GreenHouse. It helped me to step back and look at the big picture and see how God wants to be involved in this journey with me. I thought my micro view was the Big Dream, and instead, I found that it was part of something so much bigger, a chance to partner with my Creator.
Emi is part of the 2026 GreenHouse Cohort.