Listening for Heartbeats From a Georgia laundry room full of rescue animals to a Sumatran rhino sanctuary, sophomore Rikki Carver is building a life shaped by care, courage and wonder

The Laundry Room

Rikki was born in Augusta and raised in Thomson, Ga. – “out in the sticks,” as she puts it. “I spent most of my childhood outside,” she said. “Woods, nature, animals … that’s where I was happiest.” She doesn’t remember a time before animals — only that something in the house was always chirping, squeaking or trying to escape. In kindergarten her teacher asked what she wanted to be for the graduation script. “I told her, ‘I want to save animals.’ She said, ‘So you want to be a veterinarian?’ and I was like, ‘That. Whatever that is.’ And that’s what I’ve told people ever since.” By elementary school her pockets turned into lizard taxis. “I’d keep skinks and little lizards in my pockets,” she said. “Sometimes my dog would get after them, they’d lose their tail, and I’d be like, Okay, you’re coming with me, I’m gonna help you grow it back. Then they’d get loose in the house.” The Carver house, and particularly the laundry room, became a revolving door for fur, feathers, scales and mild parental concern. “I grew up with a lot of rescue pets,” she said. “Baby squirrels, baby birds… we always tried to do it the right way. We’d try to put them back in the nest and wait for the mom. But when they kept getting rejected, I’d keep them in the laundry room and hand-feed them every few hours.” There was Max the squirrel. Barn cats covered in fleas she snuck food to. And then there were the Tractor Supply chicks. “I couldn’t buy the baby chicks, so I’d ask if they had sick ones,” she said. “A lot of times they’d be in the back or they’d say, ‘We can’t sell you this one, it’s going to die.’ And I’d say, ‘Okay, but can I have it?’” She’d come home with a box of weak, half-dead chicks. “My mom would come in and there’d be, like, 20 baby chicks in her laundry room,” Rikki said, grinning. “She was like, ‘Why are there chickens in my house?’” She learned how to care for them the same way a lot of kids learn how to fix a bike chain: Google, trial and error, and stubbornness. A backpack with her stethoscope and makeshift medical tools still sits among the baskets and detergent at the house. “If they couldn’t eat, I’d mix the food with water and gently massage it down their throat,” she said. “You keep them warm, keep food in front of them at all times, and they usually come back. They just need a little extra help.” One of those chicks – a tiny, struggling bird that served as her third-grade science project – is still alive. Her name is Safari. She’s 14. “I had to wake up every three hours for about a month to feed her,” Rikki said. “I was in third grade, setting alarms in the middle of the night. But she made it. She’s still here.” If Rikki was outside, she was collecting something: frogs, turtles, worms, anything she could safely scoop up. “Anything but spiders,” Kim said, laughing. “A spider was a different story.” And even the “outside” had categories. Randy remembers her as a toddler holding up leaves like evidence. She’d ask, “What is this, Daddy?” and “a leaf” wasn’t an answer she’d accept. To satisfy her, he had to start naming species — dogwood, oak — then red oak versus white oak. By two-and-a-half, he said, she could identify 18 different kinds. And under many of those leaves were the critters that fascinated her. She watched Animal Planet in the mornings while eating cereal — wildebeest migrations, crocodile ambushes, wildlife vets delivering calves in mud and monsoon rain. Nothing made her flinch.

“I thought Dr. Dolittle was real,” she said. “I thought if I learned enough about animals, maybe they’d talk to me one day.”

Chasing Cornell

In parallel with her new life on the track, Rikki was quietly overhauling her academic world. Her family moved from Thomson to Evans, closer to Augusta, so she could attend Lakeside High School – the only school in that cluster of counties with an International Baccalaureate (IB) program. “The middle school I came from didn’t have the classes to feed into IB,” she said. “So I had to catch up. I took a crazy number of classes freshman and sophomore year just to get in.” IB was brutal, especially in her junior and senior years. But it felt like the right kind of brutal. “It was a lot, but it gave me opportunities I never thought were possible,” Rikki said. Somewhere in that window, she Googled “best school for veterinary medicine.” Cornell appeared at the top. Her mom told her, kindly, realistically, that it might not be possible. That the Ivy League didn’t make sense for who they were, where they lived, or the path she was on. “Where I grew up, Ivy League is like this mystical thing you hear about. Maybe someone in Atlanta or Augusta knows somebody who went, but it doesn’t feel like it’s for people like me.” And yet the dream took hold anyway. “Coach Mike told me, ‘You could go to the Ivy League,’” she said. “He’d had Ivy League coaches recruit his athletes before. I went home and told my mom. She got mad at him. She was like, ‘Why would you put that in her head? We can’t afford that.’”

“You’re smart. You’re an athlete. You’ve got what they want. Let them tell you no,” McCovery told her.

“I tend to decide things before logic enters the picture sometimes,” she said. She kept working. Kept competing. Kept reading about animals. She grinded through higher-level biology and chemistry while training in four events. She shadowed vets. She followed every lead. She fought her way into spaces that weren’t built with kids from her background in mind. She also started emailing college coaches. As a sophomore, she built a list of schools, researched the marks it would take to get their attention, and sent messages as soon as the rules allowed — just to get her name on the radar. Her junior year, Cornell assistant track and field coach Jacky Mendes was the first to respond. “I was like, No way. My dream school just emailed me.” She didn’t have the marks yet, but Coach Mendes kept writing back. And before long, Rikki found herself flying north for an unofficial visit with her parents. It was the dead of winter — her mother’s requirement. “‘If you’re going to go to school there,’ she said, ‘you need to see it at its worst.’” Snow hammered Ithaca the day they arrived. Rikki had never seen anything like it. Her grandmother had bought her a brand-new jacket for the trip, and she walked across campus beaming. “Everybody kept asking, ‘Why would you come now?’ And I was like, ‘What are y’all talking about? This is beautiful.’” Coach Mendes introduced her to the team. The athletes welcomed her immediately. Her parents watched all of it quietly, taking in the coaches, the facilities, the cold. They approached the whole thing with the protective skepticism of people who’d worked too hard for too long — but they felt something shift too. “Her dad was nervous about the distance until I told him that Cornell Police was literally in the basement of Barton Hall, where she’d be practicing and competing,” Mendes said. “I think that’s what put him over the edge — realizing she’d be safe here.” “By the end, they were like, ‘Alright … maybe this is God’s way of saying you should be here.’” That visit settled something inside her. Cornell wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It was a place she could picture herself — snowflakes, nerves, wonder, all of it. Other schools came later — Georgia, Clemson, other Ivies, West Point — but the decision had already been made in her heart. When they returned months later to move her in as a freshman, that sense of being watched over followed them north.  The family stayed on a small farm outside Ithaca, and after hearing Rikki talk about conservation veterinary medicine, the owner told her she needed to meet his father across the road: Dr. Fredric Scott, professor emeritus and founding director of the Cornell Feline Health Center who once sat on the admissions committee at the Vet School. He signed her books, talked with her at length, gave her advice on her future vet school application. Before the family left, they handed her parents their phone number and an offer that settled something deep in them: if anything ever went wrong, Rikki would have a place to go. “She was the perfect recruit — flying under the radar athletically, strong academically and wanting to study something Cornell is uniquely known for,” Mendes said. “After reading her essays, I knew she was exactly the type of student Cornell wants. “Everything lined up.” There was still the matter of cost. “When the financial aid package came, it wasn’t free,” she said. “But compared to what I’d get elsewhere, especially for the major that’s going to get me to vet school, it felt worth it. It was doable.” Doable doesn’t mean easy. When the doubts creep in – about money, about whether she can really do this – she comes back to the same place.

“God’s got me this far,” she said. “He’ll get me through this too. One way or another, it’ll work out.”

Into the Wild

If Cornell sometimes feels like an improbable destination, Indonesia felt like another planet. Rikki learned about the Conservation with Communities for One Health program through a class taught at the vet school by Dr. Robin Radcliffe, a wildlife veterinarian and conservation biologist who has worked with everything from Alaskan gyrfalcons to rhinos. The first time she sat in his office, she noticed the skulls on his bookshelf. “He said, ‘What species are these from?’” she remembered. “I was like, This is my moment. I guessed black rhino. He said nobody had ever gotten it right before. I don’t know if that was the deciding factor, but it definitely got his attention.” It was the first hint she belonged here — that her weird childhood knowledge, her hours watching vet documentaries and memorizing animals on Animal Planet, had prepared her for something most people never see. The internship placements are competitive. Most of the undergrads in the class were juniors, many of them top students in Animal Science. Rikki was a freshman. “I wasn’t expecting to get it,” she said. “I was just like, ‘Tell me what I need to do. I’ll try.’” She also had a practical question. “In wildlife and vet med, there are so many programs that want you to pay thousands of dollars to volunteer,” she said. “I just don’t have that. So before I let myself get invested, I asked, ‘Is this something I’ll have to pay for?’” It wasn’t. The trip was fully funded. “Once he said that, I was like, ‘Okay. I’m all in.’” On a bus ride to class, an email popped up. “I thought it was an assignment,” she said. “I opened it and it said, Congratulations, you’ve been placed with the Partnerships for the Planet Indonesia 2025 project team. I started crying on the bus. I called my mom. It was one of the best days of my life.” She got a passport for the first time. Cornell’s health insurance helped her get the stack of vaccines she needed (“Bad idea to get them all the day before your chem final,” she said. “My arms barely worked.”). And in June, she boarded a flight for the other side of the world. For two months, she and a small team bounced between field sites supported by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Jane Goodall Institute: reforested mines, national parks and village edges where elephants and people negotiate space. She hiked jungles and volcanoes, worked in national parks, learned how to translocate venomous snakes, collected data on endangered bats, mixed concrete for elephant patrol towers, slept in wooden huts and woke to birdsong she couldn’t yet name. And then she met Pahu. In Borneo, her team worked with ALeRT, a conservation group focused on Indonesia’s rhinos. Enter Pahu, the tiny, shaggy forest rhino whose picture is painted on airport walls and whose future may depend on technology as much as biology. Ancient and delicate and monumental all at once. “She’s the smallest rhino species in Southeast Asia, and there are only two of them left,” Rikki said. “They’re trying to do ovum pickups and preserve her DNA so maybe one day they can bring them back like they did with the dire wolf. We helped prep her for one of those procedures, and did daily health checks.” The keepers told her why they kept fighting — why they patrolled every night, why they believed in surrogacy projects and genetic preservation, even if the chances were small. “You don’t stop trying just because it’s hard,” they said. “You keep going.” In another site, they worked with a herpetology institute to care for snakes and study amphibians like the bleeding toad, Indonesia’s only federally protected amphibian. “I learned how to safely move a green pit viper,” she said matter-of-factly. “There’s no anti-venom for it in the entire country. The only anti-venom is in Taiwan. But they still show up in people’s houses, so somebody has to know how to get them out.” Elsewhere, they counted bats that exist nowhere else in the world, helped with husbandry for slow lorises – the only venomous primate – and worked alongside an elephant response unit in Sumatra that tries to keep the peace between crop fields and massive, hungry neighbors. “It was intense,” she said. “But it felt like seeing, for the first time, what I want the rest of my life to look like.” “Rikki excelled from the start. One thing I look for is the ability to work well with people of all backgrounds, and my partners in Indonesia told me that she and her teammate were one of the best teams I’ve ever sent,” Radcliffe said. “They were mature, adaptable and deeply respectful — exactly the kind of people you want representing Cornell in the field.” When she came back and tried to explain it to friends, one story kept surfacing: Pahu’s heartbeat. “You’re watching all these people wake up every day to care for an animal they know will probably never have a baby,” she said. “They know it’s a losing battle in some ways, but they keep doing her checkups, feeding her, patrolling her forest. They just keep going. That kind of faith that something will give if you keep working … I think that’s what I took home.”