When Lexi Herr graduated from Galesburg High School in 2018, she applied to exactly one college, toured maybe two, and wasn't entirely sure she wanted to go at all. She had no ten-year plan. She had something better: a clear sense of what she loved.

Animals. Nature. The outdoors. She had always had what she calls a weird spiritual connection with wildlife — the kind that starts early and doesn't let go. As a little kid, she tucked her stuffed animals in at night instead of her baby dolls. She had a pet chameleon in high school. When she arrived at Illinois State University and discovered conservation biology was a thing, the response was simple: "Sounds good to me."

She added zoology as a second major by her junior year and graduated in 2022 with both degrees. What she didn't tell you up front is that she earned them the hard way. School was genuinely difficult — there were semesters where she was close to dropping out, failing classes, and losing confidence. She wasn't diagnosed with dyslexia until she was eighteen. What carried her through wasn't a support system telling her she could do it. It was herself. "I had to be driven by something, and so I had to be driven by myself," she said. "I had to take that selfishness and let it drive me. And this is where it's gotten me."

Here is where it's gotten her.

After graduation, she flew alone to a wildlife sanctuary in Costa Rica — her parents freaking out about it, her fully at peace — where she worked with rescued big cats and learned what life in conservation actually looks like. From there, she joined an all-women wildfire conservation crew working through Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida, earning her wildfire certifications and spending nine-day hitches camping, eating peanut butter and jelly, and doing the unglamorous physical work of pulling invasives, cutting dangerous trees, and prepping land for prescribed burns. One hitch put the crew on a remote island off the North Carolina coast — an hour by boat from the mainland, abandoned buildings and historic cemeteries in the undergrowth, no running water, no shower for nine days. "It was very cool," she said. She says that about a lot of things most people would call hardship.

From the Southeast, she went to Orange Beach, Alabama, where she lived in a room the size of a dorm shared with three other women, their door opening directly into the wildlife rehabilitation center. They shared a kitchen and laundry with the animals. She went out on rescues, removed fishhooks from shorebirds, and wired cracked turtle shells back together. Then came North Dakota — the starkest contrast possible — where she worked with the Army Corps of Engineers, monitoring endangered piping plovers and least terns around Lake Sakakawea, knee-deep in mud and ice-cold water for twelve hours a day, walking ten to twelve miles through vast emptiness tracking birds barely visible without binoculars. The dam had flooded their nesting habitat; the surveys existed because the Endangered Species Act required it. The work mattered. "I will never step foot back in North Dakota," she said. "Cold and windy and desolate. I don't recommend it."

Then, North Carolina, where she spent more than a year as a fire technician — prescribed burns from fifty to five hundred acres, clearing storm damage after Hurricane Helene, and fourteen consecutive nights on a wildfire in Polk County that eventually reached 16,000 acres, sitting up through the night in an engine to make sure people's houses didn't burn. After North Carolina came Florida wildlife rehabilitation: raccoons, bunnies, squirrels, birds, possums, bobcats, coyotes. Then a new chapter entirely.

She has just accepted a position as an environmental biologist at Babcock Ranch — a state-owned, 100-percent solar-powered Florida community working toward becoming a fully sustainable city. She'll conduct wildlife surveys, hydrology work, and prescribed burns, and help construction developers determine where they can build without displacing a protected species. It's the kind of work she's been building toward.

"Wildlife is my purpose," she said. "It is everything I have left behind."

She doesn't need to be remembered personally. She said that plainly. "If the work I can do can be remembered, that's all I want."

Galesburg gave her the foundation — a childhood she describes as cinematic in its ordinariness: bikes to Family Video, summers at the pool, trips to the Mississippi. Her mom and her grandpa nurtured the connection to nature that became her compass. The rest she did herself, choosing her own path when others weren't sure she could, going somewhere nobody told her to go, and building a career out of a kid who just wanted to make sure the animals were okay.

"It is hard to leave home," she said. "It is hard to leave things behind and leave friends."

"It's the best thing you can do for yourself."