CNRE student finds great joy in helping wildlife

My name is Haley Olson Hodges. I'm a wildlife conservation major and entomology minor, and I'll be graduating in the spring of 2022. I actually wanted to come to Virginia Tech specifically because they have a wonderful wildlife conservation program and kind of the ethos of the school itself. Prior to hear, I lived in Florida. I was going to community college to get my associates and worked a whole bunch of various odd jobs, including volunteering for a little bit and wildlife rehab. I've always been interested in animals and I got the opportunity to do rehab well in high school. But the interest I had in wildlife and conservation in general preceded that. But rehab gave me a jumping off point. Explore that a little bit further and get sick. Have some hands-on experiences with animals that allowed me to answer, ask more questions about the world. And because of that, I'm not just satisfied with that. I want to do more with it. I want to hopefully do some research. Rehab is very individual. You can help individual animals and that's important. But I think that there's opportunity to do things on a much more broad and widespread level that'll be able to help animals, not just individually, but across the state, across the country, across the world. I work at Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center. We are a category 3 wildlife hospital within the State of Virginia. We take care Over 2000 animals every year. I started as a volunteer and very quickly was asked to become