Class of 2028: A Childhood Menagerie and a Willing Mentor With a Side of Cilantro

At every routine and sick-care visit for the pets enlivening her childhood home, Claire Roffi would go with a parent and the dog, cat or rabbit of the day and inevitably ask her family veterinarian, “When will you let me come work with you?”

Her pre-teen persistence paid off when Dr. Joseph Osbourne kindly agreed to let her shadow him once she turned 16. Her two years of volunteering at the Novi, Michigan, veterinary practice turned into a veterinary assistant job when she graduated from high school in May 2020, right when the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up.

“I was offered a spot because some people in the clinic were immunocompromised and didn’t want to come in for good reason,” says Roffi, an only child who says her friends affectionately called her home in the Detroit suburb the zoo. “I started working there to get experience, and I’ve worked there every summer since. That’s been a big part of my journey, the mentorship I received there.”

Roffi’s journey to becoming a first-year veterinary student at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine also included mind-expanding middle and high school science classes, membership in the Health Occupations Students of America organization and two immersive trips to Japan.

Novi, Michigan, has a large Japanese population so, when it came time to choose a foreign language in high school, learning Japanese seemed obvious to Roffi. 

“I grew up around a lot of different families and had many childhood friends who were Japanese,” she says. “A lot of those families were in Michigan on contract with the dad employed at an automobile company. I wanted to be able to go visit them when they went back to Japan. So I learned it and stuck with it.”

When she was 16, Roffi spent six weeks as an exchange student in a rural town called Saga on Kyushu, the southernmost island of Japan. This summer, she returned for three weeks, visiting her host family in Saga and touring Tokyo and Kyoto for a beautiful break before she starts the rigors of veterinary school, she says.

Rigor is familiar to Roffi

When she chose electives in middle and high school, Roffi gravitated toward the sciences, taking anatomy, physiology and a health professions course that required she spend time at a local human hospital.

“We got to go and practice suturing and injections and those kinds of things, and that was really where I was like, ‘I love this hands-on part of science and medicine,’” she says. “It reinforced for me that I wanted to go into that. I thought, ‘This is really awesome that the science and medicine can actually heal animals and be there for people, too.’”

In college at the University of Florida, which she chose because the school greatly reduced attendance costs for National Merit Scholarship finalists like Roffi, she was on track to graduate a year and a half early with her zoology degree but stayed on to add a degree in Japanese because she didn’t want to be so young when applying to veterinary schools. Now 22, Roffi just graduated in May.

While in Gainesville, she volunteered at animal shelters and credits Dr. Osbourne, who always offered discounts at his Michigan practice to shelter and rescue owners, with igniting that passion as well.

“It’s very rewarding to me personally to be able to help shelter animals and give back in that way,” Roffi says. “If I can even incorporate a little bit of that into my career, that’d be really awesome.”

She plans to work in emergency medicine after she earns her DVM so that she can quickly learn as much as possible, but her dream is to own a small animal veterinary clinic like Dr. Osbourne’s where she can encourage staff members and work with owners to give them the healthiest pets possible.

“It can be really hard to retain staff in the vet world with all the stress that comes with it,” she says. “I want to make sure everyone is well cared for because, without one group, you don’t have a good practice. I do enjoy working with clients as well because you get to see not only medicine healing their pets, but also the emotional impact it has on people.”

In her spare time, Roffi, an avid tap dancer, also loves to quilt and bake. 

“Cooking kind of kills two birds with one stone,” she says with a laugh. “I get to relax but then also have food.”

She donates her sewing projects to Crafters Helping Animals, a Facebook group that holds silent auctions to raise money for animal rescuers and sanctuaries. 

Because she has always wanted to foster animals herself, she immediately agreed to take in a cat, 2-year-old Cilantro, when she moved to Raleigh earlier this summer. She thinks she might have actually found something she won’t be good at.

“I told myself I wouldn’t be a foster fail, but I’m like, ‘You know what? It’s gonna happen at some point. I might as well just rip the Band-Aid off with the first one and then after that maybe I won’t feel the pull as much to adopt,’” she says. “If he doesn’t get adopted soon, it’ll probably be me. And I’ve already accepted it.”

She has promised herself she won’t add any dogs or rabbits.