 After switching from swine medicine to outreach, Sandra Sandmigel works to increase love of learning and diversity in veterinary medicine by teaching educationally disadvantaged children about veterinary science. I'm Sandy Sandmigel and I'm the Associate Dean for Engagement at Produce College of Veterinary Medicine. I get to work with wonderful people every day and I lead programs that get students as young as kindergarten interested in veterinary medicine and our goal is to diversify the profession. When I started at Produce that college I wanted to be a teacher and a dog surgeon and then my second year of veterinary college I got to go out on a hog farm and I absolutely fell in love with the pigs and changed my career goal and it became be a teacher and a hog veterinarian. When I graduated I practiced and taught swine production medicine for about 15 years. Now I have the best job in the world. I get to work with kids starting in kindergarten. I take our veterinary medical students and our vet nursing students and we go to Hanna Community Center just about every week and we deliver veterinary lessons. It's just phenomenal to watch these kids grow. Some of our first students are in high school now and we just launched some new programs called Vet Up. We were fortunate enough to get funding to start a national academy for veterinary medicine here at Purdue so I get to expand the reach to high school students and beyond. When I think of footprints I don't think of my footprints. I think of the footprints of all the kids and students that I get to work with and the footprints that they're going to leave on the world. Purdue equipped me to make the giant leap of expanding my network to wonderful colleagues all over the country so that we can work together and impact students and communities all over the world. That was Sandra Sanmiguel. Look for more stories at purdue.edu slash footprints.