As Mary Beth Bowers ’25, an aspiring veterinarian, was growing up in Albemarle, N.C., her parents constantly told her that hard work pays off. The message got through early and often.

“I’m very driven,” she said. “When I get my mind set on something, I do my best to make it happen.”

At Pfeiffer University, where she majored in Biology, Bowers put herself in the best possible position to secure a spot at a veterinary school beginning in August of 2026. She’s applying to five schools in the Southeast and will learn which programs have accepted her in the spring of 2026.

And at summer’s end, taking advantage of a “gap” between graduating from Pfeiffer this past May and starting graduate school in about 14 months, she’ll head to the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla., where she’ll work until January as an intern in the Disney College Program.

“I’ve always been a big Disney fan,” she said. “I went to Disney World for the first time during my sixth-grade year and just fell in love with it. And when I learned about the College Program a few years later, it sounded so awesome that I just had to participate in that as well.”

Bowers credits her interest in becoming a veterinarian to her love of dogs. She has three of them at home and loves caring for them. She arrived at Pfeiffer as a sophomore, having completed freshman-level courses at Stanly (N.C.) Community College while she was still at North Stanly High School.

Attending Pfeiffer appealed to Bowers for several reasons. Her mother, Erin Wilhelm Bowers, is a member of the Class of 2001 and recommended it highly, as did her grandfather, Jim Wilhelm ’69.

Mary Beth Bowers also liked the fact that the University’s campus was close to home: “Pfeiffer was down the street,” Bowers said. “I could get the college education I wanted but still live at home as a commuting student and be involved in the life of my younger sister Lainey and in what the rest of my family was doing.”

While at Pfeiffer, Bowers took full advantage of a winning combination of faculty support and challenging academics related to her major as well as opportunities to intern with and/or shadow three veterinarians, each of whom pursued a different specialty.

Bowers lauded her advisor, Dr. Laura Reichenberg, an Associate Professor of Biology at Pfeiffer who also chairs its Department of Natural and Health Sciences.

“Dr. Reichenberg had a huge impact on my time at Pfeiffer from the beginning,” Bowers said. “We discussed that I wanted to go to vet school and she helped guide me on the path that I needed to be on, in terms of the courses that I should take and the research I pursued.”

The research that Bowers completed would culminate in a project that she did as both a Milton Rose Scholar and as an Honors Scholar. It was on display at the last George Pfeiffer Research Symposium, which took place this past April in Harris Science Hall, where undergrad symposium participants stood by displays of their posters and discussed their work with guests. The project, which will almost certainly interest the veterinary schools to which Bowers is applying, investigated the impact of different dog foods on gut bacteria, with the aim of determining which type of food benefits canine health the most. She did this by employing molecular and microbiological techniques on stool samples from dogs.

As excited as she is to intern at Disney World, Bowers did consider attending veterinary school right after Pfeiffer. But given the application windows of most veterinary schools, that would have meant applying sometime between January of her junior year and September of her senior year, with admissions decisions coming during the following spring.

As her junior year was ending, Bowers felt she needed to include richer, more diverse intern/shadowing experiences for her resume and on her applications for veterinary schools — beyond the “small-animal experience” she had gained over several years as a receptionist/kennel technician under Dr. James Link’s supervision at the North Stanly Animal Clinic. So, she decided to wait until late spring of this year to apply to veterinary schools and used her senior year to gain large-animal experience by shadowing Dr. Jonathan Wesson at Rocky Creek Veterinary Services in Olin, N.C. She also shadowed Dr. Kay Dodson ’99 and other veterinarians who practice emergency medicine at Pet Emergency & Trauma Services in Kannapolis, N.C. Dodson was the subject of a recent alumni profile in Pfeiffer’s “Forever Falcons” publication. “All of these experiences will help set my resume and applications apart,” Bowers said. She now feels much the same way about her upcoming work at Disney, which she’s now also able to mention in her applications to veterinary schools.

“A common misconception about veterinarians is that they just deal with animals all day long,” she said. “But people forget that those animals have owners, so that’s who you deal with a lot as well. Owners of pets are rightly concerned about them, and they can get upset very easily. Doing Disney’s College Program will definitely enhance my customer service skills and my ability to handle the public and talk to them.”