MARE Center provides experiential internship program for students

We're very lucky here at the MARE Center to be able to do what we do. I'm really glad that I came here over the summer because it's been amazing. Every year, we do an internship program. We bring the interns in to help run whatever study that we're running. We get here at 6:00 A.M. We walk the horses to the hot walkers, and then we run them on whatever they're supposed to be running that day. It kind of changes daily. And then after we run them, we walk them back, we hose them off just so that they're not too hot, and then we put them back in their paddocks. From there, we start doing chores for the day. So that kind of includes mucking, feeding, administering any meds, doing health checks on all the horses. There's not many, like, research opportunities where I could not only combine, like my love for horses, but also actually doing research and getting to learn new things about horses in a new way. Come on. We do so much physical labor, but there is also still a lot of science going on here. We're running a research experiment from start to finish, takes about two months of the summer. So that's a lot of outdoor work running the horses, but we also do a lot of lab work. Right now we're genotyping the horses. The research aspects and all the hands on. I feel like I've learned more than the eight years I've been, like, riding horses, just getting to learn how to draw blood, working with thoroughbreds, 'cause you don't really get to see them often in the industry. At least not fresh off the track. To actually be outside and experiencing right in front of you what's happening and seeing the horses progress and become more fit and condition, and then translating those results to the lab has been really, really cool to see. These internships tend to be these well rounded experiences. And they're all going to put this on their resume. For a lot of them. This is going to help them get into vet school or into graduate school in the future because they can say that they had this experience. I think it's great that Virginia Tech has such amazing, like, Ag program. I've really been so lucky with it. I have learned so much through just being here for the past six, seven weeks I've been here. Just very exciting to see how much this internship program affected them, how much they grow from the beginning to the end. It's worth it. It's worth your time. It's worth your experience. It's a birthday.