Preveterinary freshman Emma Przekwas is striving to change that, and has been for a while now. 

Emma said her love for animals stemmed long before she arrived for her first year at MSU, and can’t remember a time when she didn’t love animals.

“I’ve always loved animals my entire life,” Emma said. “For as long as I can remember, I always have.” 

Emma’s mom, Michelle Przekwas, said that her daughter's love of animals has been slowly growing since she was a child. 

Even though Emma has always been in love with animals, she said she’s never had a pet, except for fish, when she was in elementary school.

“She would branch out to any family member that had a dog — her grandparents' dog, her aunt’s dogs, her aunt’s cat,” Michelle Przekwas said. 

Emma said that instead of a dog or cat, she always had her “little stuffed animals.”

“Those are my little substitutes,” Emma said. 

With her love of pets, Emma wanted to see how she could use her love of animals and turn it into a career.

That’s when she started to volunteer at People’s Animal Welfare Society (P.A.W.S.) in her hometown of Tinley Park, Illinois. 

Przekwas started to volunteer at P.A.W.S. at the beginning of her senior year of high school in 2015, and continued to work there throughout her senior year.

After leaving for MSU, Emma said she wanted to stay involved with animal shelters and decided to reach out to several animal shelters in the area, with some help from the MSU Zoological Students Association and the MSU Pre-Veterinary Medical Association. 

“They do (help) a little bit, but I wanted to get more involved and do something myself,” Emma said. 

This led her to reach out to Capital Area Humane Society (CAHS) to see what she could do to help. She started a GoFundMe to raise money to make beds and blankets for the dogs and cats at CAHS. 

“Beds for the dogs and blankets for the cats, because the beds probably wouldn’t fit in the (cats') cages,“ Emma said. 

Emma said she plans to buy items of a list that range from animal needs to cleaning supplies listed on CAHS's website.

“I noticed how those supplies run out so quickly so I know that’s really important for the shelter,” Przekwas said. 

This amount of volunteering, combined with the her love of animals, led Przekwas to pursue a major in Zoology, with a concentration in rehabilitation, she said.

“Working in a shelter you see a lot of injured animals come in and I don’t have any knowledge in how to help them other than the caring that I would do,” Przekwas said. “I want to rehab the animal and see their progress and watch them get better.” 

One of the rehab methods that Emma is interested in is water rehabilitation.

“If you put a dog on the treadmill but they’re immersed in water, they’re able to walk if they weren’t able to walk on normal ground,” Przekwas said. “So that really interests me.” 

Michelle said she saw this interesting in helping animals from when Emma was young.

“Overtime she knew she wanted to go into some type of medicine,” she said. 

Michelle said that once Emma started to volunteer at P.A.W.S., she started to narrow down what she wanted to do for a career, one that didn’t involve people, which was what she originally wanted to do.

“Once she got involved in that, she was like ‘you know what, I’m not thinking people anymore I’m sort of thinking animals,’” Michelle said. “I think the past couple of years have been way stronger for her.” 

Michelle said she’s happy that Emma has found out what she wants to do for her career and what she wants to study at MSU.

“She’s so determined, so interested and so passionate,” Michelle said. “She talks about it constantly (and) she tries to get other family members involved." 

MIchelle also said that Emma is just overall driven by her love and passion to help animals.

“As a parent, it’s great to see that she found something that she enjoys so much and is so passionate about and she can find that path in her life and go forward with it,” Michelle said. “It’s just great to see that passion.”