Sunny spring afternoons were the hardest part of the Cornell experience for Kenneth L.Osborn. "I'd look out the classroom window," the dairy farmer-turned-veterinary student recalls, "and think, 'I ought to be planting corn.'"
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| Kenneth Osborn, D.V.M. '01, left, and his son Kasey, a third-year undergraduate who will be in the D.V.M. Class of '05 beginning next semester, pose with a bovine patient at one of the Vet College barns. Robert Barker/University Photography |
But that was all behind him. At age 38, some 17 years after graduating with an animal science degree from Cornell (Class of 1980), after selling his dairy herd and farm in western New York, he had returned to the university to pursue his long-postponed dream of becoming a veterinarian. Now at 42, he is graduating with a doctor of veterinary medicine degree.
His son Kasey, who will be in the D.V.M. Class of 2005 beginning in the fall, won't be waiting that long.
Kenneth Osborn isn't sure why his career took a detour into the hard work and heartbreak life of farming in the late 20th century. Like a lot of bright farm kids of high school age, he was encouraged to go into veterinary medicine, and that had been his plan throughout most of four years' preparation in Cornell's Ag College.
Then, when he was accepted for an incoming class in the College of Veterinary Medicine -- but only as an alternate -- Osborn didn't pursue the opportunity. "I guess I wasn't really focused then," he admitted. Besides, he was growing a family and needed to earn money instead of paying more tuition.
So he took a job as a herdsman. Later, when dairy farming in the 1980s was especially challenging, he rented a farm -- "Not much of a farm, but a place to get started." Then, in 1990, he took the plunge in Wyoming County, N.Y., and invested in farmland. "One hundred-and-ten cows and we grew our own crops," he said.
Osborndell Farm was successful, and it was a good place for Ken and Jan Osborn to raise four children. Still, he wanted something more.
"There wasn't an epiphany or anything like that," Osborn said, but he does remember "a sort of turning point." He had been chatting with the veterinarian who visited the farm to administer to the livestock, and if that vet hadn't encouraged him to come back to school, Osborn probably wouldn't be here now. "The kids were completely caught by surprise when I asked them to help me finish the chores one Saturday morning so I could leave and take the GREs."
"Where have you been for 17 years?" one Cornell admissions officer asked Osborn. "Well, your forms are kind of long," he joked.
This time Osborn was fully accepted for admission to the D.V.M. Class of 2001, and he moved back to Ithaca and prepared a middle-aged brain to absorb a huge amount of new information in four short years. He knew he would be interested in production animal medicine, and took every opportunity to learn that specialty, including a fourth-year rotation at a beef cattle operation in Saskatchewan, Canada.
In the meantime, his oldest child, Kasey, was similarly focused on learning as much as possible about animal care as an undergraduate in Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and he had spent a semester at Lincoln University in New Zealand, studying production agriculture. Kasey was admitted to Cornell's Vet College after just three years as an undergraduate, under a provision occassionally made for exceptional students, and he will complete his bachelor's degree requirements while working on his doctorate. No, the father and son didn't room together at Cornell -- "You've got to be kidding!" Kenneth said -- but Kasey did join the same fraternity as his dad, Alpha Gamma Rho.
When Kasey Osborn matriculates with the D.V.M. Class of 2005, Kenneth Osborn will be working in a mixed (large- and small-animal) practice nearby in Auburn, N.Y. Although he will be expected to care for cats, dogs and other companion animals, it is the farm visits that he really looks forward to. More than most newly minted veterinarians, Osborn will have a special insight into the problems dairy farmers face.
Looking back on his life so far, Osborn says attending veterinary college as a non-traditional student was not the hardest thing he ever did. "That would be starting a dairy farm from scratch."
Now, with two of hardest things well accomplished, Kenneth D. Osborn, D.V.M., is finally ready to give animals the care they deserve.
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