By Nadia Pflaum | Photos by Levi Sim

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Dave Foster has worked many different jobs in his 44 years.

For a short time, he sold pest control door-to-door. He was a licensed insurance agent and an EMT. He worked in the fraud department of a bank, and for a while he was a credit counselor. Then for the last 15 years, he worked in computers.

All the while, though, Foster was thinking “I wish I was working with animals.”

He told his teachers in kindergarten and elementary school he wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up.

The thing that kept holding him back was all the school it required. He just wasn’t good at it, he says. He was in the band in high school, plodding along. He didn’t even intend on going to college, but he did, because it felt like he was supposed to.

Foster struggled in undergrad. He says he lacked focus. He tried the University of Phoenix and took some classes at Boise State, but nothing really stuck. Then he went on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to Sydney, Australia, and wrote letters back and forth with his girlfriend Karen, who he’d met when they both worked at an Idaho McDonald’s as teenagers. He proposed less than a month after he returned.

He and Karen, now his wife, moved to Utah so she could study music. They settled in Layton and lived there for 12 years, raising a family. Foster earned an associate’s degree in computer sciences and information systems from Salt Lake Community College. He got a job as a contractor for Microsoft, and later, for Unisys, a contractor for the Department of Defense on Hill Air Force Base.

Karen didn’t end up pursuing music, but became a nurse for neonatal intensive care, eventually becoming a nurse educator. The family moved to Bellingham, Washington, when she was hired at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center. Foster’s job was remote at the time, and he could go anywhere, so they went.

Eighteen months later, Karen decided she was ready to get a doctorate in nursing and changed gears entirely. She went back to bedside care as a NICU nurse, working the night shift at a hospital 70 miles from home, while completing coursework and clinical hours for her graduate degree. She says Dave’s support for her never wavered.

Foster started working remotely for Premier, a company out of North Carolina that uses software to track infectious diseases and antibiotic drug usage in hospitals. But after the COVID-19 pandemic, companies started pulling back on remote work and bringing their staff on-site. And as computer science advanced and artificial intelligence muscled onto the scene, the IT industry was showing signs of contraction. He realized he needed to go back to school, too.

“Part of what I was seeing happening in the computer industry was, it was becoming harder and harder for people in computer science to get jobs,” Foster says. “I wanted to do something different. Just totally different.”

As for Karen, she was completely supportive of Foster’s idea for a career change.

“I didn’t necessarily always know that he wanted to be a vet, but after he told me that he kind of secretly did have that aspiration, it made perfect sense,” she says. “He loves watching any shows about animals, especially the reality TV shows that follow veterinarians.”

But Foster realized becoming a veterinarian was going to take a lot more school. He’d never gotten a bachelor’s degree, after all.

In Utah State University’s Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) program, a bachelor’s isn’t required. But the list of prerequisite courses is daunting: aside from 27 semester credit hours in English composition, arts and humanities, social science and history, there is also biology (with lab), inorganic chemistry (with lab), organic chemistry, biochemistry, algebra, precalculus or higher, statistics, physics, and genetics.

“If I’ve got to take all those same classes [for a bachelor’s degree], why not go for gold,” Foster exclaims. “Why not go and do what I wish I would’ve done when I was a lot younger? Why not pursue my passion? I’ve always loved animals, they’ve always played a big part in my life. In my adult life, I’ve never not owned a dog.”

He says Karen played the biggest role in convincing him he could do it.

“She’s one of the most encouraging people in the entire world,” Foster says. “She’s a big part of the reason why I am where I’m at today. Because it seems like it doesn’t matter what kind of crazy idea I have, she’s right there to support me and to help me achieve it. And this is no different.”

Karen says she doesn’t know if the people in their lives think they’re brave or just crazy, but supporting Dave in this dream comes naturally.

“We have always had this kind of relationship, so it feels easy to support each other’s goals,” she says. “You have to have faith to make a big change, and I can’t think of anyone I have more faith in than Dave. He is extremely smart and has a phenomenal work ethic, so I have never doubted he would succeed in whatever he decided to do.”

To knock out the prerequisites, Foster looked at many schools before settling on Arizona State University’s online pre-vet program. He needed to work at the same time, while Karen was plowing through her doctorate.

This time around, Foster excelled in his studies.

“I did really well because I was a lot more focused this time,” he says. “When I went back to school I had a goal and I had more confidence in myself. I really, really wanted it.”

 Arizona State does not have a DVM program. While researching his next move, the news about Utah State launching its four-year DVM program caught his eye.

“We lived here for 12 years,” Foster says. “Utah has a special place in my heart. There’s a lot of people here that I love and a lot of really good things happened to me and my family when we lived here.”

So, he applied to join the first-ever class of future veterinarians who will graduate from a Utah institution. He was one of over 300 applicants, and among the 42 accepted.

Foster came out to Logan by himself. The family is back in Washington, though their house is on the market. The Fosters have a 13-year-old daughter in 8th grade, a 19-year-old daughter in community college, and a 21-year-old son who is recently married and works for a company manufacturing granite countertops.

They also have three dogs and a cat. He moved to USU with “his” dog, Max, an Australian shepherd mix, initially, but Max had separation anxiety whenever Foster was in class. He drove him back to Washington the next weekend he visited.

“It was the right thing for him,” Foster says, “but it doesn’t mean I don’t miss him like crazy.”

Just before school started, Karen came out to Logan and attended the White Coat Ceremony, where each vet student is presented with a lab coat as a welcome to the profession.

“The very first thing she said was how special the staff was here because she could tell that the staff and faculty care about their students,” Foster remembers. “They have conversations with you. They will talk with you in the hall, they know about what’s going on in your life, and they will ask you about it. I don’t know that you’ll get that in any other school.”

That is especially important because even he has been surprised at the new level of difficulty he and his cohort are confronting. The first test was a gut punch.

“I had a full-blown panic attack and I choked,” Foster says, describing the anatomy lab exam where he needed to name the muscles of the thorax and just blanked. “That got in my head and from there on out, it set the tone. I can’t retake that test, but I learned a lot about myself there.”

One thing the dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Dirk Vanderwall, told the students at that White Coat Ceremony was to stop competing. He reminded the students they all earned their positions in the program and the days of obsessing over GPAs were over.

That’s something Foster’s youngest daughter told him, too.

“My daughter, my youngest, words of wisdom from a 13-year-old, ‘Dad, you don’t have to get an A.’ And she’s right,” he says. “It’s way more information than you ever got in undergrad, just infinitely harder. If you can even pass and stay with the rest of the group, you should feel great about yourself.”

Foster rolled with the blow of that first test, but a few of his classmates took it harder. He says he found himself volunteered to attend that month’s faculty and staff meeting to try to help communicate some of his peers’ concerns.

“I’m not sure that some of the faculty knew quite the level of some of the struggles that were happening,” he recalls.

This was an instance where Foster’s previous life experience came in handy. Conflict management, interpersonal skills, customer service — he’s dealt with it all in his previous professions.

“I feel like we brought it to the table constructively and we weren’t trying to point fingers at anybody, at all,” he says. “We just wanted to make sure it was known, and see what resources were there to help us out. I think awareness was brought to the table, which I think was the goal, because I don’t think anyone in this program wants anyone to fail.”

Still, his life experience sets him apart from his peers. He’s the oldest one in the cohort, though he says he doesn’t really notice a generational gap — despite having kids who are the same age as his classmates.

“They have a lot easier time with the memorization, that’s for sure,” Foster says. “But I’ll be honest, they’re all really great. They’ve included me and I don’t really feel like being 20 years their senior, in some cases, has made anything hard or different for me. And I hope it hasn’t for them either.”

Foster says he and Karen sometimes do their homework together over the phone. It helps that she has been so immersed in academia, and that she’s in a medical field as well. They both puzzled over an instruction in Foster’s Clinical Skills class about subcutaneous injections that seemed to contradict what Karen knew from the NICU and what he had learned as an EMT.

Dr. Alexis Sweat was the instructor in that class, and Foster says when she couldn’t answer his question right away, she didn’t just let it go.

“She went and talked to some of the other professors and asked what they thought, she looked some stuff up and I looked some stuff up and we did some more research on it. And then we talked about it some more.” he says. “That type of interaction with a professor is something I’ve never had. And it’s something I really appreciate.”

Back in Washington, Foster’s family takes turns filling the Dave-shaped hole as best they can. Their kids do a good job of taking care of each other, and their church family checks in on Karen regularly, she says. They know this period of discomfort is temporary.

“I’m so happy for future Dave and Karen,” Karen exclaims. “I graduate at the beginning of May and am hoping to find a neonatal nurse practitioner job closer to Dave. In one year, I’m looking forward to us being back together. And in five years, the sky is the limit.”