She's a Fourth-Year Vet Student. She's Already Worked on Five Continents. And She's Just Getting Started.

Most veterinary students spend their fourth year finalizing rotations, finishing boards prep, and trying to remember what sleep feels like. Chloe Link is doing all of that and arriving at it having already worked as an African mammal zookeeper, contributed to marine mammal rehabilitation, participated in sea turtle conservation, performed wildlife capture and immobilization, and cared for more than 100 species across farms, rainforests, coastlines, and captive settings on multiple continents.

New Zealand. South Africa. Peru. Puerto Rico. St. Kitts.

And she is still a student.

If that list makes you feel like you wasted your twenties, that is understandable. But Chloe's story is not about making other people feel behind. It is about showing them what is possible when you refuse to let the traditional boundaries of veterinary medicine define the shape of your career before it has even started.

The Zookeeper Who Became a Vet Student Who Became Everything Else

Chloe grew up with a foundation in agriculture and food animal medicine. That background gave her something that a lot of veterinary students arrive without: a visceral, early understanding of the relationship between animal health and human systems. The farm is not an abstraction to her. It is where she started.

But the farm was also where she realized her curiosity did not stop at the fence line.

Her path into zoo medicine and wildlife fieldwork was not accidental. She pursued it deliberately, stacking experiences on top of each other in a way that reads less like a CV and more like a field guide to the entire animal kingdom. Dairy farms. Rainforests. Coastlines. Captive settings. Each environment added a layer of clinical and contextual knowledge that the classroom simply cannot replicate.

What emerged from all of it was a specific, fully formed vision of the kind of veterinarian she wants to be: someone who bridges domestic and wild hoofstock medicine through a One Health framework, connecting the dots between agricultural systems, wildlife conservation, environmental health, and global food security in a way that most practitioners never attempt.

She is a fourth-year student with the professional philosophy of someone twenty years into a career. The difference is she intends to spend those twenty years actually executing it.

The Amazon Changed Everything

If you want to understand what drives Chloe Link, you have to understand what happened in Peru.

She went to the Amazon expecting to gain hands-on experience with wildlife medicine. What she came home with was something harder to quantify and more important to her trajectory: a complete recalibration of how she understands the relationship between animal health, human behavior, and ecosystems.

Working at a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center in what was once one of the most biodiverse regions on earth, she was struck by how scarce wildlife had become, even in the most remote areas, due to deforestation, illegal trade, and persistent human encroachment. The animals she treated were not abstract casualties of environmental statistics. They were patients. Their conditions had specific causes. Those causes had names and faces and economic systems behind them.

That experience turned conservation from a value she held into a clinical urgency she carries. It also deepened her commitment to One Health, not as a buzzword but as an operational framework. You cannot fully understand the health of a wild animal without understanding the ecosystem around it. You cannot fully protect that ecosystem without understanding the agricultural and human systems pressing against it. Everything is connected. Peru made that undeniable.

Hoofstock, Theriogenology, and the Gap Nobody Is Filling

Here is something the veterinary profession needs to hear more clearly: food animal and hoofstock practitioners are in critically short supply, and the pipeline is not keeping pace with the need.

Chloe is acutely aware of this. Part of her mission — and she uses that word deliberately, because she has one — is to advocate for the importance of food animal medicine at a moment when the profession's attention is increasingly concentrated in companion animal practice. The animals that feed the world deserve the same caliber of care and the same depth of clinical investment as the animals sitting in suburban exam rooms. She believes this completely and she is building her career around it.

She is also developing a specific expertise in theriogenology that she intends to apply in two directions simultaneously: reproductive management for domestic herd health and assisted reproductive technologies for the conservation of endangered hoofstock species. The same skill set that helps a dairy operation optimize its breeding program can, in the right hands, help secure the genetic future of a species on the edge of extinction. Chloe intends to be those hands.

It is an ambitious combination. It is also exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that One Health demands and that the profession needs more people willing to pursue.

Growing Up Military, Growing Up Adaptable

The qualities that make Chloe exceptional in clinical settings are not accidental. She grew up in a military family, which meant moving frequently, building relationships quickly, and learning to function effectively in unfamiliar environments before most kids had figured out their permanent friend groups.

That upbringing produced three things she credits directly to where she is today. The first is being outgoing — not in the surface-level sense, but in the genuine, go-introduce-yourself-to-the-zookeeper sense that turns strangers into mentors and professional contacts into collaborators. The second is adaptability, which in large animal and wildlife medicine is not a nice-to-have but a survival skill. The third is determination. She completed part of her veterinary training while living abroad, away from her established support systems, in environments that pushed her in ways she did not expect. The idea of not finishing, she says, was simply never an option.

That is the kind of sentence that sounds like a cliche until you have met someone who means it without qualification. Chloe means it.

The Part Where She Gives It Back

Here is what separates Chloe Link from a lot of exceptionally accomplished veterinary students: she is not keeping any of this to herself.

As President of her university's Zoo, Exotic, and Wildlife Medicine Club, and through active involvement in the American Association of Bovine Practitioners and Women in Wildlife, she has been building the infrastructure of community and mentorship around her own development the entire time. Not after she arrived somewhere. While she was getting there.

On social media, she shares her journey with a specific and stated purpose: to show students that non-traditional, ambitious paths are real and achievable without sacrificing the veterinary school experience itself. The message is not "sacrifice everything and you too can work in Peru." The message is "here is what is possible, and here is how you start saying yes to it."

Multiple awards recognizing clinical excellence, dedication, and compassion, particularly in high-pressure and emergent cases, suggest that her clinical fundamentals are as strong as her adventurous instincts. The two things are not in tension. They reinforce each other.

If Not Veterinary Medicine, Then What?

Ask Chloe what she would have done if she had not become a veterinarian and she will tell you: wildlife photography.

She spent her childhood drawing and painting. As she has traveled, that creative impulse has evolved into capturing the animals she encounters through a lens, and through sharing those images, connecting people who will never stand in a rainforest or on a coastline with the wildlife that lives there. She understands that the connection between humans and wild animals is often what makes people care about conservation in the first place. And she understands that you do not have to be a veterinarian to make that connection happen.

It is a remarkably self-aware thing for someone with her resume to say. She could have led with the Amazon or South Africa or the hundred species. She led with the idea that images change minds and that caring about wildlife starts with seeing it.

That instinct, to find the human thread that connects people to animals they have never met and systems they do not yet understand, is probably the thing that will make Chloe Link not just an excellent veterinarian but an important voice in a profession that needs people willing to tell its story well.

She is a fourth-year student. She is already doing it. No wonder she’s a Vet Candy 2026 Rising Star!

Follow Chloe Link's journey on social media. Vet Candy is proud to feature the next generation of veterinary professionals redefining what a veterinary career can look like. Want to be featured? Reach out at myvetcandy.com.