Maddy Sampson has been following is just getting started.

Maddy Sampson has been following sea turtles, manatees, and a sense of purpose since she was seventeen. She is just getting started.

It is two in the morning on a beach in Costa Rica, and seventeen-year-old Maddy Sampson is in the back of a pickup truck. The road is unpaved, full of potholes and rocks and dust. She looks up and sees the Milky Way.

She is on a National Geographic expedition. She has been sleeping on concrete floors for days, no air conditioning, bugs everywhere, no phone. A local marine biologist is taking her and one other student to a nesting beach to show them where sea turtles have laid their eggs.

She does not know it yet, but she is being shown the thing that will organize the next decade of her life.

Maddy Sampson is now a fourth-year veterinary student at Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, completing her clinical year at Louisiana State University. She is pursuing board certification through the American College of Zoological Medicine and WAVMA certification in aquatic veterinary medicine. Her externship schedule reads like a field guide to the best aquatic programs in the country: the Florida Aquarium, the Mississippi Aquarium, the National Aquarium, SeaWorld Orlando, Loggerhead Marinelife Center. She has manuscripts in preparation. She has a plan.

It started on a truck in the dark, staring at the sky.

“There was so much connection. Through soccer, a cup of coffee, someone braiding your hair. So much joy in the smallest of things.”

The Trip That Stripped Everything Down

The National Geographic expedition to Costa Rica was not a vacation. Maddy is clear about that. The students spent time in small rural communities doing practical work: filling potholes, painting buildings, teaching children English. The living conditions were basic by any measure. And the people Maddy met there, who had close to nothing by material standards, were genuinely happy in a way that stopped her cold.

"It completely shifted my perspective," she says. "It showed me that you don't need material things to be happy. In fact, sometimes the people with the least are the happiest."

During downtime, the students would play soccer with locals in a field. There was a language barrier. It did not matter. Connection found its way through the game, through sharing coffee, through small acts of presence that did not require translation. That lesson, that joy is not diminished by difference and that community is built in moments rather than fluency, has stayed with Maddy through every community she has since entered.

The sea turtles came at the end of one of those days. A local marine biologist, a truck, a dirt road, the Milky Way overhead. By the time they arrived at the nesting beach, Maddy already knew something had shifted. That trip planted a seed that grew into two years as a sea turtle biologist with the Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program, work at the Caribbean Manatee Conservation Center in Puerto Rico, volunteer leadership with the St. Kitts Sea Turtle Monitoring Network, and a veterinary career aimed squarely at the ocean.

The ocean has been the constant. She was working beach chairs and umbrellas in Ocean City, Maryland at her first job because she has always loved the water. She studied marine biology and biology as a double major at Nova Southeastern University. She went to St. Kitts for veterinary school and kept finding ways to stay near the sea. The thread has never broken.

5  aquatic externship sites: FL Aquarium, MS Aquarium, National Aquarium, SeaWorld Orlando, Loggerhead Marinelife Center

2 yrs  as a sea turtle biologist, Broward County Sea Turtle Conservation Program

ACZM + WAVMA  dual board certification pathway

What Aquatic Medicine Actually Looks Like

Ask Maddy about her clinical training and you get a list of species that sounds like a marine sanctuary inventory: sea turtles, dolphins, manatees, fish, stingrays, penguins. Her four-week externship at the Florida Aquarium gave her hands-on experience across all of them. She is currently at the Mississippi Aquarium. The National Aquarium comes next, then SeaWorld Orlando, then Loggerhead Marinelife Center.

This is not accidental. Maddy has been building this portfolio with intention since undergraduate, when she began volunteering with Dolphins Plus Marine Mammal Responder and eventually advanced into a preveterinary internship role. After she started at Ross and moved to St. Kitts, she continued as an intern at Dolphin Discovery, working alongside the veterinary team there in ways she credits as central to her clinical development. The work is cumulative and deliberate.

She is also a researcher. During veterinary school she has been involved in projects on marine mammal endocrinology, pollutants in marine mammals, and general bacteriology and antimicrobial resistance. She has manuscripts in preparation as a co-author. Research is not an obligation for Maddy. It is something she is genuinely passionate about, and she says she hopes to have multiple publications by the time she is five years out.

Her path into conservation was shaped early by watching what human activity does to marine ecosystems: unsustainable fishing practices, bycatch, pollution, habitat degradation. That awareness became a driver rather than a weight. It gave her work a frame. Individual clinical care matters, and so does the broader picture, and Maddy sees both as part of the same calling.

She also believes that animals in public aquariums serve a specific and important function as ambassadors for their wild counterparts. The public does not visit the open ocean. They visit aquariums. Maddy wants to be part of the system that uses that access to build understanding and inspire action.

“If I died tomorrow, would I be proud of what I was pursuing? That question keeps me focused.”

Three Things That Got Her Here

Maddy credits three qualities for getting her where she is: discipline, determination, and adaptability. She does not present them as abstractions.

Discipline, she says, came from her parents. They taught her early that the ability to keep going, especially when things are hard or just plain routine, is what produces meaningful results. You do not get far on inspiration alone. You get far by showing up when showing up is difficult.

Determination, for Maddy, is tied to a question she asks herself: if I died tomorrow, would I be proud of what I was pursuing? It sounds blunt, but it is clarifying. It cuts through the noise of comparison and doubt and redirects attention to what actually matters. When you genuinely care about something, you commit to it fully. You do not let obstacles or fear set the ceiling.

Adaptability is the one that has been tested most. Maddy has had curveballs. Life in veterinary school at an international institution, building a clinical career in a specialty with only a handful of residency programs in the country, pursuing board certification in a field where the competition is real: none of this follows a smooth road. Her response to detours has been to trust, adjust, and keep moving.

Her faith sits underneath all three. Maddy is a follower of Jesus, and she is straightforward about the fact that her faith is central to everything she does, her clinical work, her research, her conservation commitments, and her sense of purpose. She describes herself as called to be a steward of the earth and the animals that inhabit it, particularly the ocean. That framing is not separate from her science. It informs the seriousness with which she takes both.

“I believe I have been called to be a steward of the earth and the animals that inhabit it, particularly within our oceans.”

In Five Years

Maddy wants to be finishing an aquatic animal residency, preparing to sit for ACZM boards. She knows the programs are competitive. She says so with clarity and without drama, the way someone says a true thing they have already made peace with: "A girl can try."

But she is also honest that the residency is not the whole picture. Regardless of the formal pathway, she wants to be a confident clinician and a strong leader. She wants publications. She wants to be a mentor to students who are chasing the same thing she has been chasing since a pickup truck on a dark road in Costa Rica.

She also wants community. Not in a generic sense, but specifically: she hopes to build a community of people who share her faith within a field that does not always make room for that conversation. She wants to bring people together through the way she shows up, through kindness and love and the quality of her work.

There is a coherence to Maddy Sampson that is easy to see once you read her whole story. The little girl drawn to rivers and tide pools. The teenager who looked up at the Milky Way from a dirt road and felt something shift. The student who worked beach chairs by the ocean because she has always loved the water. The veterinarian in training who is methodically, deliberately building a career in one of the most competitive subspecialties in the field, one externship, one manuscript, one sea turtle at a time.

She has been moving toward the ocean her whole life. She is almost there.

“I know I'll be a confident clinician and a strong leader. And a mentor to those pursuing similar paths.”

Three Qualities That Got Her Here, In Her Own Words

Discipline. My parents instilled discipline in me from a young age. They taught me that the ability to put your head down and keep going, especially when things aren't easy, is what leads to meaningful results.

Determination. When you care about something, you have to fully commit to it. Don't let obstacles or fear hold you back.

Adaptability. Life doesn't always go according to plan. I've learned that it's not about avoiding challenges, but about how you respond to them.