From Seahorses to Second Acts: Dr. Olivia Clarke Is Redefining the Veterinary Career

From seahorses to kangaroos, Dr. Olivia Clarke has spent her career proving that birds and exotics deserve the same gold-standard care as any dog or cat, and that leaving full-time clinical work does not make you any less of a veterinarian.

Dr. Olivia Clarke was five years old when she decided she was going to become a veterinarian, and unlike most childhood declarations, this one never really went away. Two decades later, she graduated in the top two percent of her class at Murdoch University with a double Bachelor’s degree in Veterinary Medicine and Surgery, then began building a career that would eventually stretch far beyond the traditional boundaries of small animal practice.

Today, Dr. Clarke works as an avian and exotics veterinarian at the Small Animal Specialist Hospital in Sydney, where there is no such thing as a predictable patient list. Over the course of her career, she has treated thousands of species, from seahorses to kangaroos, while continuing to deepen her expertise through a Master’s in Avian Medicine and membership qualifications in both Unusual Pet Medicine and Surgery and Avian Medicine and Surgery.

For all of those credentials, the thing that drives her most is much simpler. Dr. Clarke was drawn to avian and exotic medicine because she saw how often these patients were dismissed as too complicated, too unfamiliar, or simply not valuable enough to justify advanced care, and she wanted to challenge that thinking. As she puts it, “So many of these animals were treated as too difficult to treat, or as low value animals that could simply be replaced. I knew that wasn’t true, and I wanted to prove it.”

That conviction became the foundation of her career. Birds, reptiles, small mammals, wildlife, and other exotic species deserved the same thoughtful, high-quality medicine offered to dogs and cats, and Dr. Clarke wanted to be part of the generation of veterinarians that helped make that expectation normal rather than exceptional.

The Career Move That Changed Everything

Moving from general practice into birds and exotics was, in one sense, one of the easiest decisions Dr. Clarke ever made. She already knew that the work interested her and that these patients needed veterinarians willing to build real expertise around their care, but making the decision and actually living through the transition were two very different things.

Her move from Perth to Sydney marked the beginning of the most demanding chapter of her early career. She arrived in a new city knowing almost no one, began working solely with avian and exotic patients, and studied for membership examinations at the same time, all while working largely sole charge and trying to build confidence in a specialty where every new species seemed to come with an entirely different rulebook.

For the first few months, she genuinely hated Sydney and seriously considered moving home. Professionally, the learning curve was steep, and personally, she was trying to build a new life from scratch while carrying the pressure of proving that the career move she had fought for was actually the right one.

She stayed anyway, and that decision ended up changing nearly everything. Over time, Sydney became home, she built lifelong friendships, passed her exams, became deeply immersed in avian and exotic medicine, and created the kind of career she had imagined when she first realized how underserved these patients could be.

Looking back, Dr. Clarke sees that period as a reminder that discomfort does not always mean you have made the wrong decision. Sometimes the hardest months are simply the part where an old life is falling away before the new one has fully taken shape.

When Being a Vet Started to Look Different

The biggest reinvention of Dr. Clarke’s career came later, and this time the decision was much harder. Walking away from full-time clinical work created an identity crisis she did not expect, even though she knew in her heart that she needed a change.

For years, being a veterinarian had been inseparable from working in a clinic, because that was how she had been trained to think about the profession and how she had learned to measure her own legitimacy. When she began moving into education, content creation, and marketing while continuing to work clinically as a locum, an uncomfortable question followed her: if she was no longer practicing full time, was she still a “real” veterinarian?

Dr. Clarke describes an internal voice that told her she had somehow sold out. That voice equated leaving a traditional clinical role with stepping away from the profession itself, and it took time for her to recognize that the belief did not come from any actual loss of veterinary knowledge or commitment. It came from a narrow cultural definition of what veterinary success was supposed to look like.

Rather than rushing past those feelings, she allowed herself to sit with them and figure out where they came from. What she eventually realized was that veterinary medicine has historically done a poor job of showing graduates how many legitimate ways there are to use a veterinary degree, especially outside full-time clinical practice.

Veterinarians leave school with far more than diagnostic and surgical skills. They know how to communicate complicated information, make decisions under pressure, interpret evidence, educate people, solve problems, work across disciplines, and translate science for audiences with very different levels of understanding. Those abilities can be used in clinical medicine, research, industry, education, media, communications, consulting, public health, and many other careers.

Dr. Clarke’s own working life now combines several of those worlds. She still works clinically as a locum veterinarian, but she also spends significant time in education, content creation, and marketing, and she no longer sees those roles as competing identities.

The hybrid career that once made her question whether she belonged is now one she genuinely loves. She did not stop being a veterinarian when her schedule changed; she simply stopped allowing one job description to define the full value of her veterinary training.

The Qualities That Carried Her Through the Hard Parts

When Dr. Clarke looks back at the decisions that brought her here, she returns to three qualities: passion, dedication, and self-belief. The list is short, but each quality has been tested repeatedly throughout a career that has required her to choose difficult paths more than once.

Passion was what pushed her toward avian and exotic medicine when those patients were still too often treated as niche or low-value cases. Dedication carried her through postgraduate study, membership examinations, sole-charge clinical work, and the pressure of developing expertise in a field where the knowledge base spans an extraordinary range of species.

Self-belief may have been the hardest quality to maintain. It was necessary when she moved across the country, when she decided to pursue a specialty path, and again when she stepped away from the version of veterinary medicine she had once assumed would define her entire working life.

That does not mean Dr. Clarke moved through those changes without doubt. She is candid about experiencing imposter syndrome and about how easily accomplished professionals can question whether they deserve to be in the rooms they have already worked hard to enter.

A self-described bookworm, she points to Presence by Amy Cuddy as one of the books that helped her put language around those feelings. Reading about imposter syndrome helped her understand that self-doubt was not proof that she was incapable or unqualified, and the book also offered practical strategies for moving through those moments rather than allowing them to dictate her decisions.

She has since recommended the book to more friends and colleagues than she can count. For Dr. Clarke, its message fits naturally with what her own career has taught her: confidence does not always mean feeling certain, and sometimes it simply means continuing to move forward while uncertainty is still sitting beside you.

A Career Needs Space Outside the Career

For someone who has spent years pushing herself professionally, Dr. Clarke has also learned that stepping away from veterinary medicine is essential. Her ideal reset is a long coastal run followed by a dip in the ocean, and when that exact combination is not possible, almost any kind of movement helps her clear her head and put a stressful day back into perspective.

That commitment to recovery connects directly to one of the biggest concerns she has about veterinary medicine as a profession. Burnout, in her view, remains one of the most serious challenges facing veterinarians, but she does not see it as a problem that can be solved simply by telling exhausted professionals to become more resilient.

Dr. Clarke believes burnout is the result of multiple pressures that have accumulated across veterinary medicine. Better pay, more flexible and sustainable working hours, more time with each patient, stronger policies protecting staff from client abuse, and wider uptake of pet insurance could all contribute to making the profession healthier and more sustainable.

None of those changes would fix the problem on its own. Together, however, they would begin to create a version of veterinary medicine in which talented people do not have to sacrifice their health, relationships, or sense of identity in order to remain in the field.

Her own career transition has made that point even more personal. Dr. Clarke knows what it feels like to believe the only legitimate version of success is full-time clinical practice, and she also knows the relief that can come from realizing there are other ways to build a meaningful career without abandoning the profession you trained so hard to enter.

Growth Usually Starts Somewhere Uncomfortable

Dr. Clarke has a fear of heights, which is exactly why she recommends skydiving. She describes it as one of the most exhilarating experiences of her life, but the reason she brings it up has less to do with jumping out of an airplane and more to do with what happens when someone deliberately steps beyond the boundaries of what feels comfortable.

That idea has followed her throughout her career. Moving across Australia stretched her, choosing exotics stretched her, sitting postgraduate examinations stretched her, and leaving full-time clinical work forced her to rethink an identity she had spent years constructing.

Each time, the discomfort came before the growth. The pattern taught her that being scared, uncertain, or out of place does not necessarily mean you should turn around; sometimes it means you have reached the edge of what you already know.

It is also one reason she admires veterinarians who create unconventional careers of their own. Dr. Clarke points to Dr. Chloe Buiting, known as The Jungle Doctor, as someone she has followed since veterinary school, admiring the way she has combined veterinary medicine, wildlife work, motherhood, and advocacy into a career that does not fit neatly into one category.

Although the two have never met, Dr. Buiting’s career represents something Dr. Clarke now values deeply: visible proof that there is no requirement for veterinarians to shrink themselves into one professional identity. Seeing people build expansive, individual careers helps make it easier for the next veterinarian to imagine doing the same.

What She Wishes Every Vet Student Knew From Day One

If Dr. Clarke could return to her first day of veterinary school and tell herself one thing, it would have nothing to do with grades, exams, or clinical skills. She would tell herself that there is more than one way to be a veterinarian and that changing direction does not mean she has failed.

When she was training, the dominant message was that veterinary graduates became full-time clinicians, most often in small animal or mixed practice. Other career paths existed, but they were rarely discussed with the same visibility or presented with the same sense of legitimacy, and that narrow framing followed her for years.

Even after earning advanced qualifications, treating thousands of animals, and building deep expertise in a highly specialized area of medicine, Dr. Clarke still struggled with the idea that leaving full-time clinical work somehow made her less of a veterinarian. It took stepping outside that traditional path for her to realize just how limiting that definition had been.

She sees the profession differently now and wants veterinary students to hear that message much earlier than she did. A veterinarian does not stop being a veterinarian because their career changes shape, and the knowledge, judgment, scientific training, communication skills, and clinical perspective earned along the way do not disappear when someone takes on a different role.

That may be the most important lesson in Dr. Clarke’s story. The five-year-old who decided she would become a veterinarian was right, but she could never have predicted how many different versions of that veterinarian she would eventually become.

One version would treat seahorses and kangaroos, while another would fight for better standards of care for birds and exotic pets. Another would move across the country and wonder whether she had made a terrible mistake, while another would later leave full-time clinical work and question whether she still belonged in the profession at all.

Eventually, those versions came together into something broader than the career Dr. Clarke originally imagined. Reinvention did not erase the veterinarian she had worked so hard to become; it gave that veterinarian more ways to contribute.

Vet Candy is proud to spotlight Dr. Olivia Clarke and the veterinarians redefining what a career in this profession can look like.