She Applied to Vet School From a NATO Base in Eastern Europe. That Is Exactly the Kind of Thing Hannah Porter Does.
Most people apply to veterinary school from a library or a coffee shop. Hannah Porter submitted her applications and did her interviews from a deployment in eastern Europe, where she was overseas supporting NATO security forces. She found out she was accepted while still abroad, and spent that time planning a cross-country move to Louisiana for when she returned. This is, she will tell you, a pretty normal example of how her life tends to go.
Hannah is a second-year DVM candidate at Louisiana State University's School of Veterinary Medicine, Class of 2028, and a recipient of the Army Health Professions Scholarship Program. When she graduates, she will be commissioned as a veterinarian in the U.S. Army Veterinary Corps. Before that happens, she is spending a summer at military training to prepare for a career that may involve military working dogs, food safety missions, and One Health strategies at a scale most veterinarians never encounter.
She is also, somehow, the President of two student organizations, a representative for the American Heartworm Association, and a CityVet ambassador. She works out every day without apology. She documents the reality of being a vet student on social media because she thinks the filtered version does nobody any good. She is twenty-something and already has a resume that makes most people feel tired just reading it.
She is not tired. She is just getting started.
THE NON-LINEAR PATH
Hannah grew up in a small town where her first job was lifeguarding at the local pool. She spent four summers keeping watch over her community's swimmers, earning her certification on weekends and learning, before she had language for it, how to stay calm when things go sideways. That particular skill has proven useful in nearly everything that came after.
She went to Southeast Missouri State University for her undergraduate degree, where she also joined the Army National Guard and worked part-time as a military police soldier. She was active in clubs, worked as an assistant in human medicine, shadowed veterinary clinics, and spent time at the veterans affairs office helping student soldiers navigate their education. Then her husband was stationed in upstate New York, and they moved together.
In New York, she interned at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo and was hired as a zookeeper, working primarily with hoofstock and large carnivores. Then she transitioned to a veterinary assistant role at a mixed animal practice. Then came the deployment to eastern Europe. Then veterinary school in Louisiana. When you map it out on a timeline it looks chaotic. When you hear her talk about it, it sounds inevitable.
"Stop trying to have it all figured out. The weird detours and opportunities along the way were some of the best parts."
WHAT THE ARMY GAVE HER
Hannah joined the National Guard in college, and the decision has shaped everything since. Not just the HPSP scholarship that is funding her veterinary education in exchange for active duty service, but the way she moves through the world. The military police work. The deployment. The experience of applying to professional school while stationed overseas. All of it built a particular quality she names simply as resilience.
"I've been knocked off course more times than I expected," she says. "But every time, I found my way back, a little wiser, a little tougher, and a little more sure of where I was headed."
In five years she sees herself as a Captain in the Army Veterinary Corps, leading teams focused on military working dog health, food safety, and One Health innovation. She also sees herself as a mentor for future HPSP students, showing them how to navigate the specific and unusual opportunities that come with a military career in veterinary medicine. There is not a lot of existing roadmap for that combination. Hannah is in the process of drawing one.
THE ZOOKEEPER CHAPTER
It would be easy to treat the Rosamond Gifford Zoo as a detour in Hannah's story. It was not. Working with hoofstock and large carnivores at a professional zoo requires a specific kind of fluency, reading animal behavior, understanding species-specific stress responses, managing close-contact care for animals that can injure you seriously if you misread a situation. It is exactly the kind of hands-on, multi-species experience that a future Army veterinarian working across public health, food animal, and working dog contexts will draw on constantly.
Hannah's path looks non-linear from the outside. From the inside, every piece of it is building toward the same thing: a veterinarian who can function with competence and calm in environments that most of her peers have never encountered. That is not an accident. That is the result of someone who said yes to a lot of things that did not fit a standard plan and trusted that they would eventually add up to something.
HOW SHE ACTUALLY SURVIVES VET SCHOOL
She works out. Every day. She protected that time after a period of not protecting it, of letting every free hour get absorbed by studying, until she recognized that the workout was not optional. It was the thing keeping her functional.
"Veterinary school has a way of making you feel like every free moment should be spent studying," she says. "But I've learned that taking the time to move my body and give my brain a break is a non-negotiable for me to keep going."
She also documents her life publicly, not because it is perfectly curated but because it is not. The goal is to show people who are watching from the outside, students who think there is one right way to get into veterinary medicine, that the path can look a lot of different ways. It can include a military deployment and a zookeeper stint and a mixed practice and a move across the country and still land exactly where it was always headed.
"Versatility isn't a weakness. It's a strength. Give yourself permission to evolve in your career and your life."
THE QUALITY THAT RUNS THROUGH ALL OF IT
When Hannah lists the three qualities that got her here, resilience and adaptability come first. The third one is the one that lands differently: compassion. Not because it is surprising in a veterinarian, but because of how she frames it.
"It's easy to get lost in the science, the stress, and the grind," she says. "Compassion keeps you grounded to the reason you started."
That is not something you learn in a classroom. It is something you learn as a lifeguard watching a pool, and as a zookeeper learning to read a lion's body language, and as a military police officer deployed overseas, and as a veterinary assistant in a mixed practice where the cases are real and the clients are people having one of the harder days of their lives. Hannah Porter learned it from all of those places, which is exactly why she has it so thoroughly.
The Army is going to get an extraordinary veterinarian. LSU is getting an extraordinary student right now. And this community gets to watch the whole thing unfold.
Hannah E. Porter, B.S. | DVM Candidate, Class of 2028 | Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine | U.S. Army HPSP Recipient | Vet Candy Rising Star 2026