UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Though she came to Penn State as an undecided freshman, Brooke Migdal always knew that she wanted to work with animals.
“When I was younger, my parents would take me to zoos and aquariums, and I would talk about animals all of the time,” Migdal said. “They were the places where I always wanted to be.”
In her sophomore year, Migdal’s interest in animals led her to enroll in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences as a veterinary and biomedical sciences major. Soon after joining the college, she began working as a research assistant at the Poultry Education and Research Center under Paul Patterson, professor of poultry science.
Migdal worked on two projects at the center. The first studied the effect of different diets on broilers’ immune systems, and the second examined the impact of outdoor paddock vegetation on growing pullet behavior. She weighed chickens, examined cells and samples through a microscope, distributed feed to the birds, and performed other tasks.
Migdal was co-author on a presentation and an abstract that Patterson’s lab presented on the first study in summer 2020 and will be credited in future publications for her contributions on the second study. While these are important credentials, the most valuable aspect of working at the poultry center may have been the opportunity it afforded to explore her career aspirations, said Migdal.
“When I started, I was especially interested in learning about the interaction between nutrition and agriculture, and I got a lot of hands-on experience,” Migdal said. “It also gave me a new perspective into what I could do with veterinary medicine. I learned that I could be a small-animal vet, a large-animal vet or even go into research or agriculture.”
Migdal’s work was valuable for Patterson as well. “Brooke is a very motivated individual and worked at the Poultry Education and Research Center on top of her extracurricular activities and schoolwork in a rigorous pre-veterinary program at Penn State,” he said. “She was a great help in these studies.”