First veterinary class: New college launches long academic careers

Veterinary medicine as an academic pursuit was brand new at Virginia Tech in the early 1980s. But that didn’t stop some graduates of the first class at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine (VMCVM) from making academia a career over much of the next four decades.

Terry Swecker, Michaela Kristula, and Joseph Taboada were each among the first graduating class from the new veterinary college 40 years ago in 1984, and each pursued a long career on the academic side of veterinary medicine. 

Terry Swecker

William S. “Terry” Swecker stepped down as director of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital at VMCVM on May 10 and officially retires from Virginia Tech on June 30, capping a 34-year career at the veterinary college of which he was among the first graduates in 1984.

“I actually started my undergraduate career at Virginia Tech in business,” said Swecker, a native of Stuarts Draft. “My grandfather and uncle had a farm, and my uncle and father were both graduates of Animal Science here. And I knew Iiked working with farms and livestock. So I came over and talked to some folks in Animal Science, and they helped me transfer.

Swecker said he saw veterinary medicine as a way of working with farmers without owning a farm. The timing of his aspirations as his undergradate studies were concluding in 1980 couldn’t have been better.  

“When you’re sitting there looking at options and they’re starting a veterinary school right here, you’re thinking ‘That might work.”

Swecker recalls starting classes in the University City office building and makeshift space in Saunders Hall before finally moving into classrooms in the Phase I construction of what is now sprawling VMCVM. “But it was all okay, because we didn't have anything to compare it to,” Swecker said. 

Like many graduates, Swecker started his career in a private veterinary clinic, working with both large and small animals out of Troutville in Botetourt County. But an opportunity to return to Virginia Tech and its veterinary college intrigued him, and the rest – moving up to associate department head of large animal sciences and eventually being named director of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital in 2015 – is history. 

Again, as with entering veterinary college, aspiration met timing.

“My performance in veterinary school was not in the ranking that would put me as a highly competitive candidate for most postgraduate programs,” Swecker said. “So in the back of my mind I was thinking this opportunity is not going to be in front of me every day. This was a unique opportunity. That was a time that, within a reasonably short period of time, with North Carolina State, Tennessee, Virginia Tech, Mississippi State, and others, there had been wave of openings of veterinary schools, so there probably were more opportunities for postgraduate work as people were trying to fill the pipelines than there would have been 10 years before or 10 years later.”

Michaela Kristula 

While Michaela Kristula grew up living in multiple countries as her father served in the Foreign Service, being part of the first class of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine helped her find four-decade stability as a large animal field service clinician, teacher, researcher and associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kristula finished high school in Mexico City, but her family had spent four years in Virginia and her parents still owned a house in the commonwealth. After two years at Colorado State, she transferred to Virginia Tech to finish an undergraduate degree in biology because “it was rumored there that Virginia Tech would have a veterinary school.”

Graduating a year before the veterinary college opened, Kristula gained large animal experience working at the beef cattle center on campus, before applying and being accepted to the inaugural veterinary college class in 1980. Her primary area of interest at the University of Pennyslvania, where she has been since serving as an intern soon after graduating VMCVM in 1984, has been in dairy cattle production medicine.

“I loved Virginia Tech,” Kristula said. “I loved my undergrad, I loved veterinary school, and I probably would have stayed there forever if I had got a job there.” 

While education facilities were still being built and resources were tenuous, being part of a first-year class of the veterinary college had its advantages.

“We thought we were special,” Kristula said. ““Everything was about us. The whole faculty was new as well, so it was all new for them. We all enjoyed ourselves.”  

Joseph Taboada

Echoing Kristula’s observations, Joseph Taboada, who recently retired as professor of small animal internal medicine after 35 years at Louisiana State University, recalls how special being among the VMCVM’s inaugural class was.

“It was really a good experience,” Tabaoda said. “It was a fairly small group of faculty that were there when we started, and they were just completely focused on us. And I don't know that I necessarily realized that at the time. But having been part of faculty since then, and recognizing all of the multiple hats that you have to wear and the multiple responsibilities that you have, I know that group of faculty were really just focused on us at that time. That was something pretty special.”

A Georgetown University undergrad from Rockville, Maryland, Taboada began considering becoming a veterinarian in high school. His dad, an engineer, set him up with some volunteer opportunities with veterinarians in the National Institutes of Health. “I think he did it because he wanted to convince me that's not what I wanted to do,” Taboada said. “But it didn't work. It backfired.”

Taboada applied to several established veterinary schools but accepted an offer from the newest one on the block, located at Virginia Tech but also carrying his home state in the name an its financial support. 

While the early improvised accommodations were a little unsettling, what he learned from the young college’s dedicated faculty helped spark a lengthy academic career in veterinary internal medicine, including serving as associate dean of student and academic affairs for 20 years as well as two stints as interim director of the teaching hospital at LSU. Active in organized veterinary medicine as modeled by the veterinary college’s founding dean, Richard Talbot, Taboada is a past president of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (ACVIM).

“Their approach to medicine and the problem-oriented approach that they used, the clinical reasoning, that was what I was drawn to,” Taboada said. “Honestly, that’s what probably ended up pushing me toward internal medicine in the long run.”