Type A, Slightly Uptight, and Exactly Who SAVMA Needed

Cayden Smith Has Been Sure About One Thing Her Whole Life. Everything Else Is Beautifully Unresolved. The SAVMA President-Elect, second-year vet student, and person who still reads ten pages before bed on exam nights is figuring it out in real time and she is completely okay with that.

Cayden Smith was the kid who always said she wanted to be a veterinarian.

Not as a phase. Not as one of five options she was rotating through on a career interest survey. As the thing. The only thing. Which makes it slightly ironic that right now, in her second year at Long Island University's Lewyt College of Veterinary Medicine, she still cannot tell you exactly which kind of veterinarian she wants to be. Small animal emergency medicine is on the table. Equine racetrack medicine is also on the table. The table is large and she is comfortable with that.

What she can tell you is this: she was recently elected SAVMA President-Elect, making her one of the most visible student voices in the entire veterinary profession. She serves as LIU's AAEP Liaison, Purina Student Representative, American Heartworm Society Student Liaison, Vice President of the Rehab and Integrative Medicine Club, Treasurer of SVECCS, and SAVMA Senior Delegate. She runs at least once a week. She reads before bed, even on exam days. She answered our questions in the middle of an exam cycle without a single trace of martyrdom about it.

And yet talking to Cayden, you get none of the performative overachiever energy that resume might suggest. What you get instead is someone genuinely curious, still actively becoming herself, and unexpectedly at peace with not having it all figured out. That combination of high achievement alongside real self-awareness is rarer than it should be in this profession, and it is what makes Cayden Smith worth paying attention to.

The advice she cannot trace back to anyone

The best career advice Cayden ever received is not something she can attribute to a specific person. A friend, maybe. A family member. Something she heard at a conference and absorbed before she thought to write it down.

"Follow your passion. It leads to your purpose."

It sounds simple. It reads like something on a coffee mug. But Cayden means it in a specific, documented, biographical way that earns the simplicity.

In undergrad at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she studied Biology with an Environmental Studies minor, she started drifting toward the horse barn during study breaks. Not for her resume. Not because someone told her to. Because it made her happy. She ended up captain of the equestrian team. A research project that genuinely excited her went quiet for a while — she stayed persistent anyway. The work eventually got published.

"I am confident that following the things that ignite the most passion in me will help me to pick a position that feels as if it is my purpose," she says. "For me, this has always been finding the animal connection wherever I am. In doing so, I have had doors open for me that otherwise never would have."

The pattern is consistent: go toward what pulls you, even when it is inconvenient, even when it is not strategic, and trust that the doors will follow. So far for Cayden, they always have.

The five months that changed her

Cayden will tell you she is Type A. Structured. Scheduled. Her own word is "uptight," delivered without apology or embarrassment, which immediately signals that whatever happened next is the real story.

She studied abroad in Australia for five months, and it rewired her completely.

"Australia lives by an 'it is what it is' mentality," she says, "and this really wore off on me during my time there." The eight-plus-hour hikes. The Great Barrier Reef. The slow cultural permission to stop gripping the itinerary so tightly. All of it accumulated into something that did not wash off when she came home.

The Type A is still there — she leads multiple organizations, runs on a schedule, reads before bed without exception. But there is something looser in how she holds all of it now. A willingness to let a path unfold rather than engineer every step of it. That did not come naturally. It came from snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef at a point in her life when she was, by her own description, "incredibly structured and focused only on vet school applications." Australia reminded her that life is happening at the same time as the plan. That is a harder lesson than it sounds, and she is still applying it.

What stress relief actually looks like in vet school

Cayden is direct about this, and the directness is useful.

"Your previous stress relievers do not have to be your immediate go-tos for stress relief in vet school. Find something easier to add to your plate that serves a similar purpose."

For her, that means one run outside per week and ten pages of reading before bed, including on exam days. Not a beach trip. Not the ten-hour hike she would genuinely love. Something she can actually protect when the semester is at its worst and her willpower is at its thinnest.

"I find running usually takes too much willpower for me to even consider thinking about exams," she says. That is the point. The thing that forces you fully out of your head is worth building a habit around, even when the habit is small. Especially when the habit is small.

The village, and what it actually asks of you

Three qualities got Cayden where she is: drive, passion, and a support system she is careful not to take for granted.

During her application process, she had people who proofread essays, talked her through imposter syndrome, and helped her navigate a process that can feel completely opaque from the outside. She is grateful for all of it. She is also honest about what it means to have received that kind of support.

"To have a village requires being a villager something I am definitely restricted in my abilities to properly show up for during the demanding school semesters."

That sentence deserves to sit for a moment. Most people would list a strong support system as a personal asset and move on. Cayden names it as a relationship with obligations, acknowledges that school makes those obligations harder to meet, and says so directly instead of smoothing it over. That kind of honesty is not common. In a profession that tends to reward the appearance of having everything handled, it is quietly radical.

What she would tell you before day one

Do not review physiology concepts. Do not get a jump on the syllabi. Rest. Spend time with the people you love. Do your favorite things until the moment orientation starts.

Cayden's reasoning is specific: the hardest adjustment of first semester is not the volume of material. It is the dramatic recalibration of how much time studying consumes and how little remains for everything else. Going in rested and full makes that adjustment survivable. Going in already depleted makes it brutal.

And once you are in: keep the hobbies. At any cost. Even if keeping them means one run a week and ten pages before bed. Even if it feels laughably small compared to what you used to do.

"I wish going into vet school I knew how much my lack of time would consume me, and how important it was to prioritize healthy habits for breaks — a skill I am finally picking up in semester four."

She is in semester four. She is SAVMA President-Elect. She bakes for the people around her, runs when she can make herself, and still does not know exactly which kind of vet she is going to be.

She is doing just fine.

Cayden Smith is a second-year DVM student at Long Island University Lewyt College of Veterinary Medicine and SAVMA President-Elect. She is a member of the Vet Candy Rising Stars Class of 2026.