Megan Weidenbach Is Building Her Voice Before She Even Graduates

Megan Weidenbach Was Told She Was Too Much. She Made It Her Superpower. The third-year vet student, TikTok creator, and self-described yapper who is making noise for all the right reasons

Megan Weidenbach will tell you, without a moment of hesitation, that she is a yapper.

"I have things to say," she explains, with the kind of confidence that makes you immediately believe her. "You can talk your way into a lot of places — like vet school — with a strong will to communicate and connect with others."

She is a third-year veterinary student at Lincoln Memorial University, a North Texas native from Frisco, and a University of North Texas biology graduate who will tell you to go Mean Green before you think to ask. She is deep in small animal medicine, exploring soft tissue surgery and internal medicine. She is the President of her school's WVLDI chapter. She makes TikToks and Instagram content for thousands of followers with the stated goal of bringing the veterinary profession together in a meaningful way.

She is also, by her own proud assessment, extremely stubborn. This will become relevant.

The grandmother, the pants, and the legacy

Ask Megan about the best career advice she ever received and she does not cite a mentor, a professor, or a keynote speaker. She cites her grandmother.

Dr. Weidenbach — the original one, PhD — was a biochemist in the early 1970s. The only woman in her lab. Megan was seven or eight years old, wearing the plaid Old Navy cargo shorts that every girl wore in 2007, when her grandmother told her something she has never once forgotten.

"Never let a man tell you that you can't wear pants."

"I remember thinking that was so weird because who wears skirts? Lame!" Megan says.

She was seven. It took some years to land.

"Now that I'm older and a professional in my own right, I understand what she was trying to tell me. To think that someone would rather her wear a skirt in the lab and risk her safety — and everyone else's — than to let a woman wear pants is not shocking for the time period. It makes me happy that she has been able to watch the industry grow and change for the better."

Veterinary medicine is a field where women now make up the majority of students and practitioners. Megan is aware of this and proud of it in a specific way — not as a statistic, but as a legacy she is part of continuing. Every time she walks into a classroom, a clinic, or a comment section, she is carrying something forward.

"I carry my grandmother's successes and her legacy of resilience with me everywhere I go."

The artist who became a vet

Megan wanted to be an artist. This is not a small biographical detail — it is the key to understanding how she thinks and why she approaches veterinary school the way she does.

She works in ceramics, acrylics, and printmaking. When it came time for college, her parents held firm: a degree that promised a stable financial future. Megan chose biology because her favorite class besides art was AP Biology with Mr. Sabatier — shoutout, she says, and she absolutely means it. Somehow she ended up here.

"Part of me wishes I would've just done it anyway and not told them. Oops."

She has found ways to fill what she calls the creative bucket in other places. The TikToks. The Instagram content. Designing fundraiser items for her school's WVLDI chapter. The creative impulse did not disappear when she chose science — it found a different medium, and in doing so, found an audience of thousands of people who now follow her veterinary journey online.

Her childhood hero was Bindi Irwin. Not an abstract celebrity — a girl her own age on television doing conservation work and loving animals with visible, contagious joy. "Seeing a girl my age involved in animal science and starring in her own TV show about conservation work was so formative," she says. "I wanted to be just like her. Bindi the Jungle Girl was a staple in my house."

She somehow did not connect the dots earlier. She is fully aware of the irony now.

Beer league hockey and the first dollar

Megan's first job was keeping score at men's recreational hockey games. She was fourteen. Her dad drove her to and from work. It was a house rule: as soon as you could work, you had to.

She kept that job through high school and during college breaks. She still moonlights as a scorekeeper occasionally, describing it as one of her many side quests with the cheerful energy of someone who genuinely finds this delightful.

The work ethic is not incidental. It is the second quality she names when asked what got her where she is, right after the yapping.

"I am so stubborn — and I get it honest," she says. "My parents are some of the most hard-headed people you will ever meet, next to me. I was raised to be very hardworking and I'm grateful for that. I do not give up, on a matter of principle. If it's important to me, I will find a way to get it done."

There is something clarifying about a person who names stubbornness as a virtue without flinching. Megan does not frame it as a flaw she has learned to manage. She frames it as a feature. Given what it takes to get through veterinary school, she is probably right.

Service as a calling

The third quality Megan names is rooted in something more personal. She grew up Catholic, in a tradition that holds service as a central expression of love and care. That call to serve has been, as she puts it, an undercurrent in her life — one that guided her toward veterinary medicine and continues to shape how she thinks about what the career actually means.

"I always wanted a career that could create a positive impact in people's lives," she says. "And I think I'm in the right place."

The connection between serving animals and serving the people who love them is one Megan returns to often. It is why veterinary medicine, for her, is less about the clinical work in isolation and more about the human moment the clinical work lives inside. The client in the room is always part of the case. The community she is building on social media is an extension of the same impulse — connecting with people over something they care about, creating a space where the profession feels less isolated and more shared.

What she would tell her first-day self

If Megan could go back and say one thing to herself on the first day of vet school, she would not talk about study habits or sleep hygiene or the importance of finding your people. She would talk about power.

"You have the capacity to create change — so do it. You have agency over what your education and career look like. Make noise, be loud, and say exactly what needs to be said. Stick up for your peers, your patients, and yourself."

She adds the parenthetical out loud: "which is okay to do, by the way."

This from the woman who, as a child, was told she was a chatterbox and quietly worried she was too much. The reframe she arrived at is worth sitting with: the thing that made her feel like a liability turned out to be the thing that makes her good at this.

"As I've grown personally and professionally, I've learned that the kind of connections I am able to foster — with professors, classmates, clients, random people online — are so important to the success of our profession," she says. "I'm grateful to be a natural yapper."

Five years from now

Megan is twenty-four and the first to acknowledge that her five-year plan is subject to revision. She wants to be a DVM. She wants to build and eventually open her own practice back home in North Texas. Start a family. The classic stuff, she says, and she means it without a trace of apology.

She also wants to keep making content. "It makes me feel great knowing I can bring people together by being silly on the internet and create a space to giggle and enjoy all that veterinary medicine has to offer."

The books on her nightstand tell you something about her. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, which she recommends to anyone with a sister and warns will destroy you in the best possible way. A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass, her favorite childhood book, which she says captures the human-animal bond in a way that stays with you. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, which she describes simply as girlhood in its finest form.

These are not the books of someone thinking only about medicine. They are the books of someone thinking deeply about connection, legacy, and what it means to love people and animals well — which is, as it turns out, exactly what the best veterinarians think about.

Megan Weidenbach has always known she was going to do something interesting. She is still finding out exactly what that looks like. She is making excellent noise along the way, and the profession is better for every bit of it.

Megan Weidenbach is a third-year DVM student at Lincoln Memorial University and President of her school's WVLDI chapter. Follow her on TikTok and Instagram.