CSC senior gets special phone call
A senior at Chadron State College, Caleb Lund of Lusk, Wyo., recently received a special telephone call. He was notified that he had been accepted to enroll at the veterinary school at Colorado State University at Fort Collins this fall. The call came from one of the Colorado State deans before the letter telling him the good news had been mailed.
Besides being accepted, Lund was awarded a $2,000 scholarship that he will receive each of the four years he is at CSU. That will cut his cost of attending the school to about $10,000 annually. For its residents, the State of Wyoming pays the additional $28,000 that CSU charges non-residents who attend its veterinary school.
”It was a pretty nice phone call to receive,” said Lund. “It’s one that I’ll probably remember for a long time.”
Lund grew up on the family ranch about 20 miles north of Lusk and graduated from Niobrara County High in 2002. He was an honor student, a two-time placewinner at the state wrestling tournament and a member of the rodeo team while in high school.
He attended Dickinson State in North Dakota one year before transferring to Chadron State in the fall of 2003. He was a business major at Dickinson, but switched to range management with options in both livestock production and agribusiness at CSC.
By carrying about 20 hours a semester, he also has taken all the biology and chemistry courses that are pre-requisites for attending veterinary school.
“A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to do something in agriculture and didn’t want to sit at a desk in an office all my life,” he said. “That’s when I decided I’d try to become a veterinarian.”
Lund will graduate in May. He has made the President’s List by earning all A’s each of the past three semesters, bringing his cumulative grade point average up to 3.83.
Lund will be the seventh Chadron State graduate in veterinary school this fall. One of the others is his girlfriend, Brooke Martin, a graduate of Burke, S.D., High School who earned all A’s this past fall as a freshman in the veterinary school at Kansas State University.
“I know a lot of Chadron State grads do well in veterinary school,” said Lund. “I think it’s because of the personalized attention we can receive in our classes at Chadron State.”
During the past 10 years, two CSC grads, Tandy Sherlock Gaul, a native of Alliance, and Aprill Smith Sherman, a native of Valentine, have graduated No. 1 in their classes at Kansas State. In addition, Brandi Chytka of Hemingford was in the upper 10 percent of her graduating class at K-State last spring.
While Lund is elated to be accepted into veterinary school, he is hoping for some more good fortune this spring. His goal is to qualify for the College National Finals Rodeo in the bullriding. That will require him to finish among the top two in the event standings in the Central Rocky Mountain Region.
He ranked among the top 10 in the regional standings last year and believes that with a little luck of the draw and some good riding he can continue Chadron State’s tradition of producing outstanding bullriders.
Two CSC bullriders, Will Farrell and Dustin Elliott, were collegiate champions in recent years with Farrell winning the title twice.
Category: Campus News