Kristin Mitchell: No Plan B
In the tenth episode of What's Your College Story?, Katie sat down with Kristin Mitchell — a woman who decided at age five that she was going to train dolphins, and never really changed her mind. What followed was a biology degree, years of unpaid internships, a hurricane that derailed a paid position at a Texas aquarium, an eventual landing at SeaWorld Orlando, two dolphins named Rose and Luna, and a pregnancy that she worked through right up until labor. Kristin's story is one of the most honest accounts of what dream-chasing actually looks like: unglamorous, expensive, worth it, and not quite finished.
The Dolphin Girl
Kristin grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. When she was five or six years old, her family took her to Brookfield Zoo, and she watched a dolphin show.
I said, that's what I want to do with my life. And I was one of those kids — I never really wavered from that. Growing up, I was the dolphin girl. Everybody knew that I wanted to be a dolphin trainer when I grew up.
She spent time figuring out exactly what the job required. The checklist was specific: educational background, strong swimming ability, public speaking skills, a scuba certification, and animal experience of any kind — even caring for pets at home counted at the entry level. She went into college knowing what she needed to come out with.
She enrolled at Brigham Young University Idaho, earned a bachelor's degree in biology, and deliberately tailored her coursework toward animal sciences over plant sciences. Outside the classroom, she found ways to build the other skills on the list. She took a public speaking class in high school. In college, she got into social dancing — ballroom and swing — and eventually became an instructor, putting herself in front of groups regularly. When the activities department offered a scuba certification course at a student discount, she jumped on it.
I tried to set myself up through college as much as possible before I graduated and then went on to do those internship opportunities. Through college, I was kind of joking — this dolphin training thing had better work out, because I don't have a Plan B.
Key Largo, Then Corpus Christi
Her first internship was at Dolphins Plus in Key Largo, Florida. She spent a summer there, working 40 hours a week, unpaid. And she fell completely in love with it.
With that first internship experience, I fell in love with it, and I was like, there is nothing else I want to do with my life.
But 40 unpaid hours a week has consequences. By the end of that summer, she had to go home, get a regular job, and save money before she could pursue the next opportunity. That cycle — chase the dream, run out of money, regroup, go again — would define the next several years of her life.
Her next move was to Corpus Christi, Texas, and the Texas State Aquarium. She started as an intern, got hired on as a seasonal paid employee in the dolphin department, and was building real momentum — until a hurricane hit that fall. The financial damage from being closed for an extended period meant the aquarium couldn't keep her on as a paid employee.
They said, we can't keep you on as an employee, but we do want you to be able to stay and gain experience — so they actually created a volunteer position for me that was more than what I was doing as an intern, but not quite as much as I was doing as a paid employee.
She stayed for another six months as a volunteer. Then, with opportunities not materializing into anything stable, she made a hard call and stepped away from marine mammals entirely for a few years. She went into dog training to keep her animal skills sharp and her resume relevant. It wasn't the dream. But it was smart.
SeaWorld: Orcas, Then Dolphins
In 2022, the path back opened. Kristin landed her first permanent position — at SeaWorld in Orlando, working in the killer whale department. She was brought on primarily as a trainer's assistant: diet prep, backstage logistics during shows, and operating the long poles used to cue the whales during presentations. She got close enough to touch them, in controlled settings, which she describes simply as incredible.
She also took on the guest-facing work — answering questions at the underwater viewing area, narrating training sessions at the Dine with Orca experience. The public speaking she had built up in college, in ballrooms and swing dance studios, was suddenly directly applicable.
After her first child was born, she transferred to Discovery Cove — SeaWorld's day resort, also in Orlando — where she finally got to work directly with dolphins. Her two were Rose and Luna. She was in the water with them regularly. She was pregnant with her second child for part of that time.
I was in the water with the dolphins when I was pregnant with my second. The team was very protective of me being pregnant, and was always very, very accommodating for that.
She had already decided she would work until her baby arrived. She told her employer she'd come in the morning she was in labor if she was scheduled — to say goodbye to the dolphins. When the baby came in August 2025, she was done. Two kids in childcare, on a dolphin trainer's salary, didn't add up. She turned in her notice and stepped away.
I will not regret for a second of my life that I pursued it, and I did it. And I also don't regret stepping away from it for a time, and knowing that I can potentially go back to it in the future.
The Mentor in the Water
One of the most consistent threads through Kristin's story is mentorship. At every stage — the internships, SeaWorld, Discovery Cove, and now in building a business from home — the people who could show her the next step made all the difference.
At Discovery Cove, senior trainers worked alongside her in real time, reading the animals and passing that knowledge across in the moment — not in a lecture, not in a textbook, but right there in the water.
My two dolphins were Rose and Luna, and they were so different in personality and so different in how you connect with them. Having those senior trainers who could work with me and say, okay, we're gonna be with Rose today — even in the middle of an interaction, come up to me and be like, hey, just be aware, she made this noise, or I saw this body language, and that means X, Y, or Z.
It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something — that's the colloquial thing. But if you have a mentor or somebody who's already where you want to be, they can take you along and maybe shorten that, so that way it doesn't take you that full 10,000 hours to get where you want to go.
More Than Just Dolphins
What Kristin learned in her years of animal training goes well beyond behavior cues and feeding routines. She absorbed the legal history of marine mammals in human care — how collection of wild dolphins and killer whales for shows began in the 1960s, and how a 1972 federal law changed everything by prohibiting the collection or harassment of wild marine mammals without special permits.
She learned about operant conditioning — the psychology behind animal training — not as theory from a textbook, but as something she had to apply in real time, with real animals, in front of real guests.
You will learn theory about animal care in a degree program. But there's nothing quite like getting that hands-on experience. If you take psychology classes and learn about operant conditioning, there's a big difference between the theory of what that is and actually applying it — what does this actually mean when I have a dolphin in front of me?
Every animal has their little quirks. It's important to know those histories — not only as a species, but also that individual. Does the animal have any particular health concerns you need to be aware of? If you have a dolphin who's been rescued who's deaf, the care of that animal is going to be different than an animal who still has full use of their hearing.
A New Chapter at Home
Kristin is currently home with a toddler and an infant, running a network marketing business she stumbled across on Facebook while on maternity leave. She found mentors there too — people who had already built what she was trying to build — and is applying the same instincts she used in the water: watch, learn, apply, iterate.
She is clear that stepping away from dolphin training is not the same as leaving it behind forever. The door is open. The skills are intact. The knowledge is still hers. And at some point, when the timing is right, she may walk back through.
Why Her Story Matters to Elikonas
Kristin Mitchell has a biology degree. She also has years of animal training experience that will never appear on a transcript. The scuba certification she got on a student discount. The public speaking she built through ballroom dancing. The operant conditioning she learned by applying it to a dolphin. The legal and natural history of marine mammals she absorbed on the job. The mentorship that compressed her learning curve in ways no classroom could.
A traditional résumé can list where she worked. It can't show what she actually learned — and it certainly can't capture the gap years, the unpaid seasons, the volunteer position a hurricane forced her into, or what she figured out about herself and her field through all of it.
That's the gap Elikonas exists to close. Every internship, every certification, every mentor relationship, every thing learned by doing rather than by sitting — it all counts. It all deserves a record. Kristin's story is a perfect example of an education that happened almost entirely outside of formal structures, and that prepared her for a career that formal education alone never could have.
The only thing holding you back from the things that you want to do is yourself. You just have to push through those doubts and put yourself in the mindset and in the spaces to believe that you can do whatever it is. If it's dolphin training, if it's owning a home, if it's building a business, getting an education — the only thing standing in your way is you, and if you get out of your way, you can do amazing things.
Watch the Full Episode
Catch the full conversation with Kristin on YouTube — including what it's actually like to be in the water with dolphins while pregnant, and what operant conditioning looks like when the subject is a killer whale.
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About What's Your College Story?
What's Your College Story? is a weekly podcast hosted by Katie Stroud, founder of Elikonas, Public Benefit Corporation. Each episode features a real conversation with a real person about their education journey — the detours, the discoveries, and everything in between. The show exists to celebrate non-traditional paths and to build the community that Elikonas will serve. New episodes drop every week. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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