Between them, Olivia Di Ruzza and William “Joe” Hampton have been deployed to more than 10 countries, commanded scores of fellow military members and made innumerable critical decisions affecting their troops and seamen so a key anatomy exam last week barely tested the nerves of the first-year veterinary students.

Di Ruzza, 26, recently completed four years as a company executive officer in the Army, directly responsible for the training, readiness, safety and well-being of soldiers stationed at Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington state. Hampton, 32, spent nine years in the Navy, the last ones leading explosive ordnance disposal teams on multiple deployments of aircraft carriers. 

Di Ruzza and Hampton are two of four military veterans among the 125 students in the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine’s Class of 2029. They join 14 other students enrolled in the DVM program who identified as veterans or service members when they applied to the college.

“I’ve had to switch my mindset to start studying again, but I think the discipline that I gained through the Army is what helps me to stay focused and motivated,” Di Ruzza says. “I was put in a lot of high-stress situations where I was the one responsible for making the decision so I feel prepared for anything.” 

With their first Veterans Day as vet students upon them, Di Ruzza and Hampton will be thinking of their colleagues still serving even while they ruminate on nervous system anatomy and physiology.

“The day is a reminder to text and reach out to some friends who are either still in or getting ready to get out,” says Hampton, who was discharged in 2023. “When I got out of active duty, I felt a little lost. My entire adult life has been spent around the Navy so I try to reach out to my friends and tell them I’m here if you want to talk because it’s just nice to have someone who’s been through it.”

Veterans Day for Di Ruzza, the daughter of a career Army soldier and granddaughter of a Vietnam veteran, will mean reflecting on how much her and her family’s service has influenced her life and on those still protecting the country. 

“It’s a tough job to have,” says Di Ruzza, who will be home for Thanksgiving in Charlotte, North Carolina, this year for the first time in four years. “You’re pulled away from your family during holidays or during the weekend. You have early mornings and late nights. I’ll be thinking about all my peers and mentors who are still serving and thank them for what they do and continue to do.”

Di Ruzza isn’t a Charlotte native. Her parents retired there when her father left the Army after serving 28 years. She was born in Kansas but then moved to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to Germany, back to Fort Bragg, to Newport, Rhode Island, to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before being accepted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In college, Di Ruzza majored in biology, knowing she wanted to be a veterinarian, and joined the ROTC, which paid for her schooling and committed her to spending four years in the Army. During her service, the cat lover spent available weekends volunteering at veterinary hospitals.

“I view animals as another member of the family, and that’s how many other people also view it,” she says. “That’s why they take their animals to the vet, so I’d say being a veterinarian is also treating the person, because it’s helping them heal some sort of wound that they are experiencing for their animal.”

Di Ruzza sees a lot of parallels between being an Army leader and a veterinarian who has to make the tough calls when caring for animals.

Continuing a Legacy

During a joint exercise in the Philippines, she commanded a movement control team responsible for tracking, staging and loading hundreds of pieces of equipment onto a vessel for redeployment operations. In Japan, she served as a transportation mobility officer, planning and overseeing the execution of more than 60 simulated movements of personnel and equipment during an exercise.

“I’m a very disciplined person who likes structure, so I think that helped me kickstart my career in the real world outside of college,” she says. “In the Army, I gained so much experience communicating with people of all different ages and cultures and backgrounds, and as a young officer, it kind of pushes you to lead very quickly.”

Di Ruzza is applying to have the Army, the only branch with a dedicated Veterinary Corps, pay for her veterinary degree through its Health Professions Scholarship Program, which would mean returning to military service.

“Since my father and grandfather both served, I feel the need to continue that legacy in the Army,” she says.

Inspiring Hampton — the grandson, son and brother of medical doctors — into military service were a high school teacher, a Naval Academy graduate who was “genuinely a nice person,” and Pat Tillman’s story. 

Hampton remembers when Tillman, a popular professional football player who volunteered to become an Army Ranger after 9/11, died in 2004 while providing cover for fellow soldiers during a tour in Afghanistan.

“When I was in high school, I read a book about him, and he was just the person I wanted to be,” Hampton says. “He was really tough and smart but also really down to earth and would talk to anyone. He was really genuine. He was inquisitive. I read that book, and I was, like, ‘I want to be like him.’ ” 

Hampton applied and was admitted to the US Naval Academy, where he majored in history and, despite being afraid of water and heights, chose to focus his military career on explosive ordnance destruction work, with dive training in Florida followed by jump school in Georgia. 

“It made me extremely comfortable with being uncomfortable,” Hampton says, a necessary and often overlooked life skill.

His first deployment in 2019 was on an aircraft carrier off the coast of Oman. He also deployed to the coast of South America, where he got to practice his Spanish, spoken by his mother, a native of Nicaragua. 

“I got to teach a class on explosive safety to some Colombian Marines, and I felt like if I could do that, I probably can talk about just about anything in Spanish,” he says. “I was teaching cube roots and some basic math to them. In Spanish!”

After exiting the Navy, he joined the National Guard and was deployed almost immediately to the Middle East from July 2024 until March. A great lover of dogs, he decided to skip the human medical path of his family and to step into the veterinary world, sending in his veterinary college application possibly from Kuwait. He isn’t sure where he was.

“My Sunday school teacher growing up was a veterinarian, and he’s just a real country guy, Dr. Cribb,” says Hampton, who cites his dog Okra as his best friend but who also is fond of goats and sloths.. “He’s literally the best human in the entire world, and he kind of put into my head that being a veterinarian would be cool. I wanted to be like Dr. Cribb.”

Hampton, also an avid rock climber, has served as a guide for a company in Western North Carolina, where he hopes to practice mixed animal medicine and continue his mountain adventures when he graduates. 

“Rock climbing is a team effort,” he says, “very similar to veterinary medicine or the military.”

‘We’re All the Same’

Both Hampton and Di Ruzza say drawing on their military experiences — learning other cultures, navigating diplomacy, taking responsibility, leading with respect — will make them even better veterinarians. 

“Even if we look the same, they could be very different from who you are, and you may have to switch a viewpoint or be open to learning what is normal for them,” Di Ruzza says. “I’m always open to learning about new cultures and people because I want to do my best to be as respectful as I can. That is true in veterinary medicine as well.”

Hampton had the same epiphany as he moved from noticing how people communicate differently and come from different cultures to concluding that people are mostly the same.

“The Chilean and Panamanian bomb techs I worked with came from very different cultures, but we’re all the same person somehow,” he says. “We grew up in different hemispheres, but somehow we are actually the same. It’s similar with veterinary medicine, in that people who care about their animals might come from all different backgrounds, but in the end, we’re all kind of the same person. We care about animals.”

Having lab partners who were in grade school during his first deployment, however, has been a slight adjustment for Hampton, as has leaving a situation that was predominantly male (2% of the EOD force and 20% total Navy) and arriving where his classmates are mostly female. Across the country, more than 83% of the veterinary medical class of 2027 is female.

What he also has found at the NC State College of Veterinary Medicine is the comforting care of new mentors among the faculty and the peace of toiling among friends.

“I tell my dad all the time that I haven’t met a single classmate who isn’t a nice person,” he says. “And I feel like I am surrounded by these gods, with all of these Ph.Ds and DVMs who have like a million publications. It’s a really cool academic experience to be with true experts teaching you and being available to you. They all seem really committed to seeing us succeed.”