The Long and Winding Road

Dr. Dianne Beal ('10)
The path from a kid who loved animals to a veterinarian owning her own clinic has been met with a few twists and turns along the way. But Dianne Beal always knew she wanted to work with animals and in the sciences. She just didn’t think she would become a veterinarian. “It wasn’t necessarily my dream to be a veterinarian,” she said, “actually at one point I considered being a marine biologist.” That dream never materialized and for a while it didn’t appear veterinary medicine would be in her future either. The upstate New York native earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and was working in the sciences as a researcher at a pharmaceutical company. So Beal decided it was “now or never” to get her DVM. She spent her first two years studying at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and although she enjoyed the experience she wanted to get back to the United States. “Out of the blue, Iowa State wrote me asking if I was still interested and would like to transfer,” she said. The rest of her career came together. Today she owns a clinic in Mystic, Connecticut.