Animal scientist finds pearl of a career
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| Photo provided
Kim Hamilton directs an oyster gardening program in Alabama's
Mobile Bay. The project not only improves the quality of the water
through oyster filtration, but also protects young oysters, grown
in these floating baskets. |
By Tom Campbell
For as long as she can remember, Kim Hamilton, BS '99, has wanted to
be a veterinarian, caring for horses on a thoroughbred farm in Kentucky.
Instead the Purdue University animal sciences graduate is raising oysters
on an island in Alabama.
Everything she had done during the first 21 years of her life had led
her in the direction of Purdue's prestigious School of Veterinary Medicine.
She grew up caring for animals on a traditional Indiana farm in Flat
Rock, just north of Columbus, raising horses and pigs.
In 1999, she took a summer job at a large confinement hog operation
to gain more hours working with large animals. She even spent a semester
in Honduras, studying at Zamorano University as part of Purdue's International
Programs in Agriculture.
She improved her foreign language skills and learned about aquaculture
by raising tilapia on the school's fish farm. She had already been rejected
once by the vet school. But now, with all this experience in her pocket,
surely the vet school would take her this time around.
But in March of 2000, three months after she graduated, Hamilton received
her second ding letter from the vet school. She didn't handle the rejection
well.
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Kim
Hamilton, BS '99