From Rejected Princess to Future Veterinarian: How Mary-Lou Degryse Rewrote Her Own Fairy Tale

After France’s competitive exams shut the door, this 20-year-old found her calling 800 miles from home — and proof that a detour can still lead exactly where you were meant to go.

Every veterinarian has an origin story, but Mary-Lou Degryse’s starts somewhere unexpected: with a dream of becoming a Disney princess. Long before she was memorizing anatomy or sitting through pharmacology lectures, Degryse imagined a future that involved castles, costumes, and a little bit of magic. The princess plan did not last, but the part of her personality behind it did. She has always been someone who dreams big, commits fully, and has a difficult time imagining herself doing something halfway.

Veterinary medicine became the dream that stuck. Now 20 years old and preparing to enter her second year of veterinary school in Madrid, Degryse is finally living the future she had imagined for years. Getting there, however, looked nothing like the straight line she expected. Growing up in France meant facing an intensely competitive veterinary admissions system, and Degryse encountered rejection more than once as she pursued opportunities both at home and abroad.

At the time, those closed doors felt like setbacks. Looking back, she sees them differently. Instead of treating rejection as proof that she was not meant to become a veterinarian, she began to see each disappointment as redirection. Spain eventually became the place that said yes, taking her hundreds of miles from home and giving her the opportunity she had been chasing. The experience taught her early that there can be more than one route to the life you want — and that a different path is not necessarily a lesser one.

Finding Her Place in Veterinary Medicine

If veterinary medicine truly had not worked out, Degryse says she probably would have become a biology teacher. It is an answer that makes sense when she talks about the kind of veterinarian she hopes to become. She enjoys explaining difficult concepts, helping people understand something that once felt intimidating, and seeing the moment when information finally clicks. Those same skills, she has learned, matter just as much in an exam room as they do in a classroom.

One of the best pieces of advice she has received is that diagnosing an illness is only part of being a good veterinarian. The other part is knowing how to explain what is happening to the person who loves that animal. A technically perfect diagnosis does not mean much if the owner leaves confused, frightened, or unsure what to do next. For Degryse, communication is not an extra skill layered on top of medicine. It is part of the medicine.

“Diagnosing an illness well is essential, but knowing how to explain it and reassure the owner is just as important.”

That philosophy extends to another lesson she has already embraced: veterinarians do not have to pretend they know everything. Degryse believes there is professionalism in being able to say, “I don’t know,” then asking for help, consulting a colleague, or referring a patient when someone else is better equipped to manage the case. Veterinary medicine is too broad for any one person to master every answer, and she sees humility as a strength rather than a weakness.

She is also thinking about something many veterinarians do not fully appreciate until they are already deep into practice: boundaries. Caring about clients and patients does not require being available at every hour. Degryse believes learning how to be attentive without being permanently accessible will be essential to building a sustainable career. For someone still early in veterinary school, she is already thinking not only about how to become a veterinarian, but about how to stay one without losing herself along the way.

Life in Madrid: Study, Rugby, Repeat

Veterinary school has given Degryse a demanding schedule, and living in another country has made independence part of the curriculum too. Most mornings begin around 7 a.m., followed by the commute to school and the first study session of the day. By 8 a.m., her books are open. She studies until around 10, takes a short coffee break, then returns to revision before lunch. After another review session, afternoon lectures begin around 2:30 and can run for four hours, often covering subjects such as anatomy and pharmacology.

By early evening, Degryse heads home for dinner and a little time to mentally step away from school. Then comes another important part of her routine: training. Most nights she is either at rugby practice or working through a weight session before finally winding down around 11:30 p.m. It is a full schedule, but she has learned that getting through veterinary school is less about constantly pushing harder and more about creating routines she can actually sustain.

Exercise has become one of the ways she protects that balance. Degryse trains about four times a week, and the benefit is as mental as it is physical. Rugby and weightlifting give her somewhere to put the stress that accumulates after a long day of concentrating on difficult material. For those hours, there is no exam to prepare for and no lecture to replay in her head. There is simply movement.

The same is true of the time she spends talking with her family and her boyfriend. Sometimes the best reset is not another conversation about veterinary medicine, but a completely ordinary one. She reads because she is curious, not because the material will appear on a test, and she creates social media content because it gives her a creative outlet with no grade attached to it.

For Degryse, balance is not about dividing every day perfectly between school, relationships, exercise, and creativity. It is about making sure veterinary medicine does not become the only thing in the room. Moving, talking, learning, and creating are the pieces she returns to when she starts to feel consumed by the pressure of school.

What Rejection Taught Her About Resilience

If Degryse could sit down with the younger version of herself, she would not start by telling her to study harder or work longer. She would tell her to take care of her mental health. She knows now how easy it is for ambitious students to attach their entire sense of worth to whether a particular plan happens on time.

For years, she had pictured a specific route into veterinary medicine. When that route did not unfold as expected, the delay felt larger than it really was. Rejection can feel permanent when you are young and convinced that everyone else is moving forward without you. Degryse eventually realized that a dream taking longer does not make it less real.

She would also tell her younger self to trust time and trust her own instincts. There will always be other people with opinions about what the correct route should look like, how quickly a person should succeed, or when it is time to give up and choose something else. Her own experience taught her that the path can change dramatically while the destination remains the same.

That lesson has reshaped the way she thinks about failure. A setback is no longer automatically evidence that she is heading in the wrong direction. Sometimes it is simply information. Sometimes it forces a new plan. Sometimes it sends you to another country where the opportunity you were looking for was waiting all along.

The People Behind Her Confidence

When Degryse talks about the people she admires most, she immediately comes back to her parents. Her mother is an anesthesiologist-intensivist who built an advanced medical career while raising three daughters. Watching her manage the demands of medicine and family gave Degryse an early example of what dedication looks like when it has to exist alongside a full life.

Her father showed her another version of resilience. He built businesses without following a traditional educational path, learning through experience and continuing to rebuild when things did not go according to plan. What Degryse admires most is not simply what he accomplished, but his ability to treat setbacks as opportunities to begin again.

Together, her parents created the stable foundation that allowed Degryse and her sisters to imagine ambitious futures for themselves. That support matters even more now that she is studying far from home. Moving to Madrid required independence, but it also made her more aware of how much of her confidence began with the people who taught her that changing direction does not mean giving up.

That influence can be seen throughout her own story. Her mother modeled commitment. Her father modeled reinvention. Degryse is now learning how to combine the two.

The Future Is Still Wide Open

Five years from now, Degryse hopes to have her veterinary degree in hand and perhaps already be immersed in an internship as she begins exploring a specialty. She does not yet know which direction she will ultimately choose, and for once, she is comfortable leaving that part undecided.

There is something fitting about that. After spending so much of her younger life focused on reaching one exact destination, she is learning to appreciate the uncertainty that comes after finally getting there. She wants to experience different areas of veterinary medicine, meet clinicians who challenge her thinking, and discover what type of work genuinely excites her before deciding what her career should become.

More than any particular job title, Degryse hopes the next five years leave her with greater confidence in herself. She wants to look back and see not only someone who earned a veterinary degree, but someone who became more comfortable with uncertainty, more willing to ask for help, and more capable of trusting her own decisions.

That is also the message she would give to students walking into veterinary school for the first time. Feeling overwhelmed does not mean you do not belong. Making a mistake does not mean you are not capable. Asking someone for help does not make you less intelligent. Veterinary school is not designed to prove that students already know everything; it is supposed to teach them how to think, adapt, and keep learning.

“Perfection is not the goal. Resilience and learning are.”

It may be the best summary of Degryse’s story so far.

The little girl who once imagined becoming a princess did not get the future exactly as she pictured it. The teenager who expected a straightforward path into veterinary school did not get that version either. Instead, Mary-Lou Degryse got rejection, redirection, a move to Madrid, long days of studying, rugby practices, a growing sense of confidence, and the chance to build something that belongs entirely to her.

Maybe that is the better fairy tale anyway.

Not the one where every door magically opens.

The one where you learn how to keep going until you find the door that does.

Vet Candy is proud to feature Mary-Lou Degryse as one of our Rising Stars.