When Dr. Julia Herman speaks with veterinary students, she often begins with a phrase that has become something of a personal mantra.
“I always tell the vet students ‘never say never’,” she says.
It is advice that reflects the path her own career has taken. Herman has worked in wildlife research, cattle practice, veterinary teaching and now industry leadership. Today she serves as beef cattle specialist veterinarian with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), where her work centers on preventive medicine, biosecurity and producer and veterinary education across the beef industry.
Rather than focusing on individual animals, Herman now works at the level of the entire production system.
“The cattle industry is my client, so that adjusts how I work with folks,” she says.
Her days might involve lecturing veterinary students, collaborating with researchers on biosecurity plans or coordinating with state and federal agencies involved in animal health. Much of the work revolves around Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) programs and broader preventive medicine efforts designed to strengthen animal welfare, food safety and industry sustainability.
“The BQA is essentially preventive medicine,” Herman says. “We’re trying to teach all these preventive medicine topics.”
It is a role that operates far beyond the exam chute or treatment pen. But it is also not the career Herman originally envisioned when she first decided to become a veterinarian.
The Zoo Vet Dream
Herman grew up in a small town in eastern Colorado, where agriculture was present but not necessarily the center of her early career ambitions. As a kid, she raised rabbits and pigs for 4-H and FFA projects, but her imagination was often focused somewhere else entirely.
“Initially, I wanted to be a zoo vet,” she says.
Her fascination with animals started early, fueled in part by the books she devoured growing up.
“My parents had this entire collection of National Geographic books that I just read all the time,” she says. “I went to the Denver Zoo for my birthday parties and learned as much as I could about a variety of animal species.”
Those interests led her to pursue a zoology degree at Colorado State University, where she focused heavily on wildlife management and genetics with her undergraduate research. One of the most memorable experiences during that time was a research internship at the Smithsonian National Zoo studying cheetah reproductive biology.
“Which sounds cool,” Herman says, “but mostly I just pounded poop and extracted hormones out of said poop to evaluate cyclicity.”
The experience was still meaningful, but it also helped clarify something about the direction she wanted her career to take.
“I realized that I didn’t want to just do research and knew that veterinary school needed to be the next step.”
Like many of the turning points in her career, it was a moment where plans shifted slightly rather than dramatically.
When Wildlife Met Livestock
Herman’s graduate research would bring her closer to livestock agriculture in an unexpected way. Her master’s project focused on genetic resistance to brucellosis in Yellowstone National Park bison, a topic that bridged wildlife conservation and cattle health.
“It incorporated my wildlife genetics interest, that I had already been working in the lab with, and conservation biology,” she says. “But it also put me back into the livestock realm because brucellosis is a regulated disease.”
The project highlighted how closely connected different areas of animal health can be. Wildlife disease, livestock production and public health were not separate fields, but overlapping systems that influence one another.
That systems-level, One Health perspective would eventually become central to Herman’s career.
Her Way Into Agriculture
Herman’s path into food animal medicine did not follow the traditional script. She describes herself as a first-generation student navigating much of the veterinary pipeline independently.
“I’m a first generation student,” she says. “There’s a lot that I feel like I had to learn on my own.”
Without established connections in the profession, she relied heavily on persistence. She emailed dozens of professors looking for research opportunities and contacted veterinary clinics across northern Colorado in search of experience. Those efforts eventually led her to work for several years at a small-town veterinary clinic while applying to veterinary school.
Once enrolled in the DVM program at Colorado State University, Herman intentionally sought out as many different experiences as possible.
“I really tried to have this huge breadth of experience,” she says.
During veterinary school, she pursued opportunities ranging from a public health internship in Chile to dairy medicine training at Cornell University and feedlot health work at Feedlot Health Management Services by TELUS Agriculture Canada. The goal was not to specialize early, but to learn broadly.
She holds the position that making students choose a track in veterinary school might be short-sighted.
“I think everybody should have to learn about all species because you don’t know where your path is going to go,” Herman says.
The Realities of Practice
After graduating, Herman accepted a mixed animal practice job in Stockton, Kan. But even then, she was deliberate about making sure the position would provide meaningful experience with cattle.
“A lot of times when mixed animal practice jobs are posted, they say mixed animal practice, but it’s mostly small animal plus or minus a little bit of horses,” she says.
The Kansas clinic delivered exactly what she had hoped for. Located in one of the state’s leading cow-calf counties, the practice provided extensive hands-on cattle work and strong mentorship from veterinarians with different backgrounds and levels of experience.
“Practicing in Kansas was a memorable start to my career,” she says. “The people were fantastic. I had a really great team to work with and learn from.”
Still, life outside the clinic soon influenced the next step in her career. When her husband’s job brought the couple back to Colorado, Herman once again found herself looking for new opportunities.
The Pivot She Never Expected
Her next move came through a familiar strategy: sending emails to professional contacts asking if anyone knew of openings in the area. One of her former professors came back with a suggestion she had not anticipated. He was leaving his position and asked if Herman wanted to take his place.
“I never thought I would be in academia,” Herman says. “It was an opportunity that fell into my lap.”
She accepted the role and became a clinical instructor in livestock ambulatory medicine at Colorado State University. The position allowed her to continue working with cattle while also mentoring veterinary students.
Teaching quickly became one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.
“The veterinary and graduate students are so excited to just learn and try new things,” she says. “And being a part of setting that foundation of what they’re going to do in the rest of their career — I love that piece.”
Looking back, Herman now sees teaching as one of the threads that has run through every stage of her career:
“If anything has been consistent, other than preventive medicine and public health themes, it’s the teaching piece.”
A Career Turning Point to a Job that Didn’t Exist
Eventually, several factors pushed Herman toward another career transition. Team dynamics within the department changed, and she was managing tendinitis in both hands — a repetitive strain injury common in physically demanding veterinary work.
“I realized that I couldn’t be doing physical work for the rest of my veterinary career,” she says.
At the same time, she noticed her interests shifting toward larger-scale challenges within animal health systems.
“Figuring out how I could impact veterinary medicine and the cattle industry beyond clinical practice was an interesting step,” she says.
That desire prompted her to begin searching for roles that would allow her to work at that broader level.
Eventually Herman came across a job posting for a newly created position with NCBA that would reshape her career entirely.
“I’m the first veterinarian in this position, which was exciting and has been a learning curve,” she says.
As NCBA’s beef cattle specialist veterinarian, Herman was given broad flexibility to shape the position. She quickly focused on preventive medicine, animal welfare, biosecurity, and producer and veterinary education across the cattle industry.
Her work often involves helping producers recognize how everyday management decisions influence disease risk and how veterinarians can better collaborate with those producers.
During a training program in Uganda focused on foot-and-mouth disease response, Herman visited farms managing outbreaks in endemic areas. One example from that trip now appears frequently in her presentations.
They overviewed a situation involving three farms.
“Farm A has sick cattle. So farm C and B are like, well, we’re going to come help you because that’s what we do as cattle producers,” Herman explains. “Then they end up taking foot-and-mouth disease back to their herd.”
Without biosecurity measures, their good intentions spread the disease.
“I give that example,” Herman says. “And then I ask the audience: how many of your neighbors did you invite over for the branding?”
Then comes the follow-up question that reframes the situation: “And did you ask them to wear clean clothes, clean boots and to clean out the hooves of their horses so that they’re not bringing anything to your operation?”
More Paths than Students Realize
Herman spends a significant amount of time speaking with veterinary students about the many directions their careers can take. Too often, she says, students believe the profession offers only a narrow set of options.
“I don’t think the veterinary industry does a good job at showing all those different avenues of what veterinarians can do,” she says.
Veterinary medicine today includes roles in research, industry, public health, education and policy, many of which operate far beyond the clinic setting.
“You can do whatever the heck you want in veterinary medicine,” Herman says. “There are all these career paths where you don’t have to stay in a particular lane. There are so many ways you can impact the veterinary industry and animal health.”
Her own career serves as a reminder that those paths are rarely predictable. What began with childhood dreams of zoo medicine eventually evolved into work shaping preventive health strategies for an entire industry.
And that, Herman says, is exactly why she tells students the same thing every time.
Never say never.
