Linda Rhodes still remembers the late 1960s high school report card that didn’t make sense.
Every physics exam came back with an A. Every lab report earned top marks. She loved the subject, still owns the textbook and can vividly remember the excitement of being one of the few students enrolled in Advanced Placement Physics.
Then the report card arrived. Her final grade was a C.
Convinced there had been a mistake, Rhodes showed her father the stack of graded assignments. He gathered them up and went to the school to ask the teacher what had happened.
The answer had nothing to do with physics.
“You know, she’s really bright and she really gets this. It’s clear that she’s really a smart young woman, but I don’t want to encourage her,” the teacher told him. If he had given her the A she deserved, he explained, she might have pursued physics or mathematics, careers he believed had no place for women.
Rhodes’ father wasn’t interested in deciding his daughter’s future for her.
“Give her the grade that she earned,” he replied. “Let her decide what she wants.”
Today, Rhodes still tells the story with a sense of disbelief. The teacher had never treated her differently in class. The bias lived quietly beneath the surface, invisible unless you happened to be the student whose future someone else had already decided.
Readers of Rhodes’ memoir Breaking the Barnyard Barrier know what came next. Fresh out of veterinary school in 1978, Rhodes arrived in rural Utah determined to practice large animal medicine. Instead, she found herself entering a profession where many producers, and even fellow veterinarians, simply couldn’t picture a woman doing the job.
The resistance wasn’t always loud. Sometimes it appeared in small conversations.
At one Utah Veterinary Medical Association meeting, a practitioner casually explained why he would never hire another woman.
“I hired a woman once, a while ago, and she didn’t work out,” he told Rhodes. “So I wouldn’t hire another woman.”
Rather than arguing, Rhodes asked him a question.
“Have you ever had a guy that didn’t work out?”
Of course he had. He admitted he’d hired several men who turned out to be poor employees. Then he stopped.
“Well ... gosh, I guess I have to think about this.”
Rhodes doesn’t talk about those moments with bitterness, but with curiosity, as though she were trying to understand the assumptions behind them rather than dwell on the unfairness. Still, there were times when excellence simply wasn’t enough.
One conversation in particular stayed with her. After completing a successful position in Utah, she was praised for her work, only to be told they still wouldn’t hire another woman.
“I had proven myself,” she recalls. “And yet it wasn’t enough to break through the cultural stereotypes.”
Many people would spend years trying to change those attitudes, but Rhodes decided to keep on moving.
Creating Opportunities Instead of Waiting for Them
Leaving Utah brought Rhodes to an embryo transfer facility in Yuba City, Calif, working at the forefront of reproductive technology. Professionally, it was everything she had hoped for. Personally, it was another story.
The hours were relentless. Her mother had recently died and her marriage had dissolved. Outside of work, she knew almost no one.
“It only lasted a year,” Rhodes says. “It was way too much work, but the main thing was I was really, really lonely.”
She packed her belongings and headed to New York, closer to her sister and the support system she desperately needed.
However, this didn’t solve the employment problem. Opening her own practice would have meant competing against established clinics while carrying student loans and handling every emergency call herself. Joining an existing practice wasn’t much easier.
“None of them wanted to hire me,” she remembers matter-of-factly.
So she stopped asking where she might fit, and started looking for a problem no one else had solved.
At the time, many rural veterinarians simply didn’t take vacations. There was no one available to cover their clients, so families stayed home year after year.
“I started what I called a relief practice,” she says. “If a vet wanted to take vacation, I would come in and be the relief vet.”
Sometimes the hardest part was convincing the veterinarians they deserved time away from work. Rhodes often found herself making her case to their wives.
“Wouldn’t you like to have a vacation?” she would ask. “I can cover the practice while your husband is gone.”
One veterinarian handed her the keys to his truck and his house before leaving town. Rhodes moved in, took over the practice and cared for his clients until he returned. Dairy producers appreciated her reproductive expertise. Word spread. Soon she was filling in for maternity leaves, covering additional practices and even accepted a temporary teaching appointment at Cornell University.
Following Curiosity Across Continents
Around that same time, Rhodes met an Israeli veterinarian who had come to New York to complete licensing requirements. Their relationship developed quickly, but Rhodes wasn’t about to move halfway around the world on faith alone.
“If we’re going to get serious,” she told him, “I’ve got to go and live in Israel for a while and meet your family.”
She began writing letters to universities across Israel, introducing herself as a veterinarian with embryo transfer experience and asking whether anyone might have a research position. Ben-Gurion University offered her a sabbatical appointment studying embryo transfer in sheep, work that aligned perfectly with the experience she had gained in California.
The arrangement was modest. She lived in a tiny graduate student dormitory with a kitchenette, rode a bicycle to work each day and spent her time conducting research.
Then the phone started ringing.
Large animal veterinarians across Israel heard there was an American veterinarian who knew embryo transfer and invited her to teach them techniques that had barely reached the country. And no one seemed to care about her gender.
“They had no large animal women vets,” she recalls. “But they were just more open to having a woman. They didn’t care. I could have been from Mars as long as I could teach them what they wanted to learn.”
For the first time in her career, expertise came before expectation.
Building a Career on Continued Learning
By the time Rhodes returned from Israel, another door had already opened. Cornell, long recognized as one of the country’s leading programs in bovine reproduction, offered Rhodes a fellowship to pursue a PhD, which she accepted.
Each move in her career led naturally to the next because she kept saying yes to work that interested her. Clinical practice introduced her to reproduction. Reproduction led to embryo transfer. Embryo transfer opened the door to research. Research eventually led to pharmaceutical development.
“I just figured at some point it would all come together in some direction,” she says. “I didn’t know what it was going to be. I didn’t care.”
It’s a striking philosophy in a profession where students often feel pressure to map every step of their careers before graduation. Rhodes trusted that meaningful work would reveal itself if she continued learning.
After completing her doctorate, another opportunity appeared.
A pharmaceutical company in New Jersey needed a veterinarian with expertise in reproduction to help develop animal models supporting human drug research. It was a significant departure from practice, but it offered another chance to learn.
So, once again, Rhodes changed direction.
She spent the next decade in pharmaceutical research, building expertise in an industry that was still relatively unfamiliar territory for veterinarians. The work was stimulating, the challenges were complex and the opportunities continued to grow.
Eventually, however, something began to feel familiar. The work excited her, but the bureaucracy did not.
No Longer Asking Permission
When asked about when she stopped feeling like she had something to prove, Rhodes doesn’t mention an award or a promotion.
“I think it was when I started my own company,” she says. “Up till then, particularly in the big pharma world, I was constantly trying to prove myself. When I started my own company, I could set my own terms. I got to do what I wanted. I didn’t have to ask permission.”
Those final words echo throughout her career.
She didn’t wait for someone to create a relief practice. She didn’t wait for an invitation before writing universities in Israel. She didn’t wait for permission to leave clinical practice, pursue research or build a business.
Again and again, she looked beyond the traditional path and asked where she could make the greatest contribution.
Her first company, which managed clinical trials for animal drug development, grew into a successful business that she eventually sold. Retirement appeared to be the logical next step.
Instead, another opportunity found her.
Rhodes was asked to lead an animal health startup developing novel therapies for dogs and cats. The challenge appealed to her immediately.
Within five years, the company had guided three drugs through FDA approval, an extraordinary pace in veterinary medicine. Yet when Rhodes talks about those years, she rarely focuses on the milestones. She tells a different story.
Sometimes she’ll meet someone who mentions their older dog is finally comfortable again because of the osteoarthritis treatment, Galliprant.
She smiles.
“How do you know about Galliprant?” they’ll ask after she recognizes the drug.
“Well,” she replies, “I developed that drug.”
The exchange lasts only a few moments, but for Rhodes, it captures everything she wanted from a career. Not recognition, impact.
Redefining Success
Along the way, Rhodes stopped measuring success by titles. Instead, she asked the following questions:
Did she enjoy going to work? Was she building something worthwhile? Were her employees finding meaningful careers? Were clients able to bring valuable therapies to market? Were animals benefiting?
“Success became less about how much money I was making and more about whether I was building something that was providing me satisfaction and great jobs for a bunch of other people,” she says.
That perspective continues to shape her retirement.
Today, Rhodes serves on the boards of several animal health companies, advises startups navigating FDA approval and mentors entrepreneurs trying to solve the next generation of veterinary challenges. She speaks about those roles with the same enthusiasm she once described practicing bovine reproduction.
Learning never stopped. Neither did contributing.
She traces that philosophy back to a conversation with her father.
An engineer at Xerox who helped invent the color copier, he once admitted that, despite his accomplishments, he sometimes wished he had pursued medicine because he wanted to spend his life doing work that more directly helped others.
Rhodes believes that conversation stayed with her. Looking back now, she sees a career that reached far beyond the dairy farms where it began.
“I feel very proud,” she said. “It’s been a kind of twisted path.”
Twisted, perhaps. Aimless, never.
