From LVT to DVM: Kristi Casale's Journey Is Just Getting Started

Kristi Casale spent six years as a licensed veterinary technician before stepping back, starting over, and earning her seat in vet school. She'll tell you the detour was the whole point.

There is a version of this story where Kristi Casale never becomes a veterinarian. Where she stays in shelter medicine until there is nothing left to give, or where she decides that the academic path was never really meant for her, or where she accepts the quiet ceiling that so many people never think to question. That version of the story exists because she almost lived it.

Instead, she chose herself. And now she's choosing medicine.

Casale grew up in Niagara Falls, New York, with the kind of love for animals that doesn't require an explanation — it just is. She channeled that love into a degree in Veterinary Technology in 2017 and spent the next six years working as a Licensed Veterinary Technician, building clinical skills and learning the interior life of veterinary medicine from the inside out. By most measures, she was doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing.

But Kristi Casale has never been especially interested in most measures.

The Decision That Cost Her the Most

In 2018, one year into her career, Casale made the hardest call of her professional life. She walked away from shelter medicine.

"Compassion fatigue isn't just being tired," she says. "It is a soul-deep exhaustion that turns your empathy into a liability, and that's the direction I felt I was headed."

Shelter medicine asks enormous things of the people who practice it. The emotional weight is constant, the resources are rarely enough, and the patients cannot tell you they understand why you have to make the choices you make. For someone who got into this field because of how deeply she cares, that environment can quietly dismantle the very thing that made her good at it.

Leaving felt, in her own words, like a betrayal. Like abandoning the patients she loved. But she recognized something that takes many professionals years — sometimes decades — to learn: you cannot pour from an empty vessel, and staying until you are empty does not make you noble. It makes you ineffective.

"I knew I had to choose myself," she says, "so that one day I could return with the clinical depth and emotional boundaries necessary to lead in a field that demands so much of you."

That kind of self-awareness is hard-earned. Casale earned it early.

Don't Mistake a Detour for a Dead End

For years, Casale carried a belief that limited her. She viewed her path as an LVT as a consolation prize, evidence that she didn't have the academic pedigree for veterinary school. The detour felt like a verdict.

It wasn't.

It was training. Six years of hands-on clinical experience, real patients, real decisions, real consequences. The kind of foundation that a classroom can point toward but never fully replicate. When Casale finally made the decision to step away from practice in 2023 to complete her prerequisites, she wasn't starting over. She was building on everything she had already become.

"The struggle wasn't a sign of failure," she says, "but a necessary chapter of my training that shaped my unwavering belief that I belong in this profession."

In March 2025, Rowan University's Shreiber School of Veterinary Medicine sent her an acceptance letter. The detour had delivered her exactly where she was always going.

She is now a member of the Class of 2029, serving as Class Council Vice President and President of the FelineVMA Student Chapter. She got there the long way. She got there.

What She Sees From Here

Casale doesn't see the access-to-care crisis as an abstract policy problem. She sees it as the defining challenge of her generation's veterinary career, and she has a clear-eyed view of what's driving it.

"The most pressing issue facing veterinary medicine today is the widening gap in access to care," she says, "a crisis that is fundamentally linked to the lack of diversity within our profession. When our workforce doesn't reflect the communities we serve, cultural and financial barriers prevent millions of pets from receiving care."

Her solution is not a single fix but a philosophy: embrace a spectrum of care model that meets clients where they are, and build a profession that looks like the world it serves. It is the kind of thinking that comes from someone who has spent time in shelter medicine, in community practice, and in the uncomfortable space of examining her own assumptions about who belongs in this field.

She belongs. She has always belonged. She just had to live enough of the story to know it.

The People Who Made Her

Ask Kristi Casale who shaped her, and she doesn't hesitate.

Her mother, Kelley, is her first answer. "Driven by passion, empathy, and fortitude," Casale says, "all traits that I aim to embody every single day." Her brother Jake is her second — the hero of her childhood who taught her that resilience is not just about enduring hard things, but doing it with grace and optimism. Both of them are woven into the way she moves through a profession that will ask a great deal of her.

She has the instinct for it. She has the experience. She has the clarity that only comes from having already walked away from something that was breaking her and found her way back stronger.

The Class of 2029 has no idea what's coming.

Follow Kristi Casale on Instagram and TikTok at @soontobe_drc.