Final Semester

The final semester has finally begun. And I definitely have a case of senioritis. I have been at my computer for the last hour with my notebook open, ready to study GI/Nutrition for ICARE...but I keep finding other things I could do (like write a BLOG). Oh well.

This semester is definitely as difficult as the others with ICARE, but the motivation level is way down. My time is spent on other school related things like preparing a dance for the talent show, or working on class websites, or KE pledging. This semester we have 9 pledges and they are amazing! I'm glad we have such a wonderful pledge class. I know they will keep KE going strong next year.

Ok sorry to keep this short but I really SHOULD be studying! I'll try to write again soon.

Winter Break! Finally!

Well - that was definitely the hardest semester yet in pharmacy school! The sheer volume of material is what makes it so hard. No more are the days where you can cram IBHS material into 1 weekend as a P1...if you don't start studying for an ID exam at least a week in advance, you can kiss that A good-bye. This winter break is welcomed by myself and my classmates with open arms in hopes that it will last forever! But - the plus is that we are in the homestretch! Only 1 more semester of classes and then we are on to rotations where some of us will stay in Winchester, but some we will have to say good-bye to as they travel to other cluster locations.

During this semester, we ranked our choices for clusters and received our assignments. I am lucky because I am guaranteed the Winchester cluster as I am married, my husband has a job here, and we own our townhouse here. Because of those things, it is silly to send me to a cluster 2 hours away. A lot of classmates put Winchester as a top choice because they won't have to move and find a new place, the faculty are great as preceptors, and the rotations provide a lot of challenge. After clusters are assigned, you have to rank each individual rotation preference within your cluster. Tonight at midnight is the deadline for those rankings...and I believe we find out what our rotations are for sure by Spring break next semester. So - I'll be looking forward to that!

Next semester I've heard is just as tough as this past semester. We have ICARE Musculoskeletal, ICARE GI/Nutrition, and ICARE Neuro/Psych. In addition to those tough classes, we have Pharmacy Law, sterile compounding lab, PK/PGx, Patient Assessment II, IPPE V, and a professional practice selective (mine is Institutional). So - we will see how that goes. I already feel like I am getting a bit of senioritis though as far as the end of classes go. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

As for break, I just finished working every day since finals except 1 for a total of 45 hours and I finally have the next 4 days off to enjoy. For the remainder of break, I'll probably work a little bit more...but I plan on cooking and baking some yummy food, visiting family, and LOVING that I don't have that nagging feeling that there is something that I should be studying!

Survival of the Fittest

So - P3 year is definitely proving to be the most difficult so far. We just got through our first round insane exam-taking with insane amounts of material and I barely survived. This is definitely where those who are on top of their game and have perfected their study technique will make it, and those who aren't, won't. We completed our first ICARE module (endo/repro) this past week and started the next one, which is heme/onc, today. Before endo repro, I never knew how complicated a girl's life can really be - birth control, pregnancy, labor, delivery, lactation, menopause...ugh, can't wait.

Aside from all of the tests, I have been quite busy with other things as well. I am a co-chair for operation immunization in APhA and we have been working on setting up some flu clinics. Also, the leadership fraternity, PLS, is accepting new members and we recently went through applications to select those who we may want to extend an invitation to. My fraternity, KE, is having an induction for some new members this Friday and also hosting a bowling event tomorrow night along with a dinner for survivors in two weeks. Class officers are meeting tomorrow to discuss events related to graduation. And we have a project for a class we are (supposed to be) working on in the mean time that I need to start focusing on. This project requires us to create our own pharmacy in every aspect and present it to the class along with to the teacher in the form of a paper.

And I gotta fit the hub and pup in there somewhere! Needless to say, fall break (this past mon and tues) was a welcome break and I can't wait for Thanksgiving break! Today we are having a meeting about rotations and ranking where we would like to be in terms of our clusters. I am going to put down Winchester because we own property here and it would be crazy financially for me to try to live somewhere else. I have heard this is a circumstance that guarantees you a spot. Should be interesting to see where everyone wants to go.

I will try to update more often from now on!

P3 Year Begins

Is it finally my last year of classes? I guess it feels more like, is it ALREADY my last year of classes? These last two years at pharmacy school have been a blur! I can't believe it has gone by so fast. But for this P3 year, it is just beginning. I am a little bit scared of my ICARE classes this year...I have head that Infectious Disease is the toughest class yet. It may be my last year, but also my hardest!

Even though the classes may be more difficult, I also feel more comfortable in the school than ever. I am super excited for all upcoming events for the organizations that I am a part of. It seems like there is at least one event every week that I have to look forward to. I know that with all the business going on, it will make this year FLY by. (I'm hoping!)

The first week of class has been a good one as far as school goes. It was great to see friends again that I lost touch with over the summer. It's also nice to work less! Not sure about that working world yet - I am glad to return to school! I have all of the normal P3 classes in addition to two electives. For my electives I am taking Intro to Mental Health and Spanish for Pharmacists - both of which seem very interesting and like they will be a fun learning experience (Si! Muy bien!). In terms of how the first week was outside of school...it has been a bit hectic. My pup, Lily, got spayed on Thursday and it has been a challenge keeping my hyper dog calm. She has also started exhibiting some weird phantom pregnancy symptoms that we hoped would go away - like nesting and hoarding her stuffed toys like they are her puppies. Yeah - needless to say it has been interesting. We hope she heals quickly and this passes fast because it has been taking a toll on my sleeping schedule!

Well, guess it's time to start studying...

Last Day Of Classes Ever

Today marks an important milestone in my life. Today was the last day of classes I will ever have in my academic career. Up to this point my life has been focused on doing well in classes. Now as I prepare for my last week of finals I see myself at a crossroad. Although my classroom education will soon cease, a new chapter in my quest for learning will start in a matter of weeks.

Soon I will start rotations. During rotations the primarily passive nature of my learning will shift gears. I can no longer regurgitate the concepts I have been taught, but will have to actually apply the knowledge that my professors have worked so hard to teach me. There will no longer be diabetic patient scenarios whose insulin doses I need to titrate, but real patients with diabetes who probably have other disease states that I have to consider as well. I won't be solving for a patient's creatinine clearance on a pharmacokinetics exam, but instead I will be calculating the creatinine clearance of an ICU patient who is on cefuroxime and needs his dose adjusted. I won't be counseling a 4th year "patient" on how to use an insulin pen, but instead will have to counsel a real patient who is starting insulin for the first time in her life, explain that there is no need to be afraid of needles, and demonstrate how to properly self-administer the insulin needed. These are just a sample of scenarios I may encounter while on rotations. The spectrum of patients I will encounter will far surpass the sampling I saw in school. So although my classroom based education is now coming to an end, the hands on learning is about to be taken to the next level.

Although none of our experiences will be exactly the same, one thing that is common for all of us in the P3 class is excitement. Some of us are excited that classes are over, others are excited to start rotations, and then there are the ones like me who are excited for both reasons. In preparation for this major transition we have had several meetings in regards to what to expect on our rotations. The list of tasks and projects we have t do during rotations looks like a road map to me (and a landmine field to others). At the end of that road map will be what I have sacrificed many social occasions and put in years of hard work for...my Pharm D.

One of the great ways that the spring semester ends each year here at BJD is Phollies. Phollies is an event that students and staff work together to create funny parodies, videos, and skits as a away to reflect the last year. Some videos are parodies of our unique experiences here at BJD and others are more related to the current pop culture. But every year on the last day of classes, all the videos are shown and a few skits are performed, while the whole school turns out to laugh, laugh, and laugh until tears are streaming down our faces. Phollies is an event that I always look forward too, especially this year, since the P3 class is the one who organizes it each year and it is wonderful to see all the hard work and unique talents people put into organizing such a great event.

Good luck on finals!

Spring Enthusiasm

It has been a while since I last wrote here and quite a lot has occurred. Rotation sites and dates have been announced. Another ICARE is over and done with. Our first law exam has come and gone without much of a scar being left behind. Oh and I went to my first national pharmacy convention.


So rotations are not too far from now, trying to stay focused on classes is a bit of a challenge because of how excited I am about my upcoming rotations! I start off easy with a community rotation at a company that I have worked at before, so I think it will be a nice transition away from schoolwork. Then, after that, I have 15 weeks at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. I am very excited about those 3 rotations. I will be completing my inpatient/acute care, drug information, and one of my selective rotations there. I have heard positive feedback from other pharmacy students who have had the opportunity to work at Hopkins. Not only did they gain much knowledge from their preceptors but they also had a variety of experiences. It will probably entail a great deal of hard work, but I am nonetheless excited because of how much I stand to learn from that experience. Next up will be my ambulatory care rotations at Kaiser Permanente. I am also looking forward to that rotation because I have the least experience in the ambulatory care setting. My past jobs have been in the retail setting and I did some IPPE hours in a hospital setting. Afterwards I will be at Georgetown University Hospital for my second selective rotation which I know will deal with the neurosurgery ICU and infectious disease. After our infectious disease course here at school I definitely think this rotation will be important. Regardless of what setting I will end up practicing in, infectious disease will probably have a role because of its wide scope and the more experience I gain in that area the more my future patients will benefit. Then I will be ending my rotations at Suburban Hospital with my institutionally based rotation. Suburban Hospital is also affiliated with Johns Hopkins. The rotation line up that I have is exciting and I wish I could fast forward to mid May so I could get started.


But before I can happily skip to rotations I still have classes that I aim to do well in. Right before Spring Break we finished our ICARE course in GI/Nutrition. We have now started ICARE Musculoskeletal. Another major class this semester is Pharmacy Law. The previous class (current fourth year pharmacy students) really scared us about pharmacy law. So when the time for the midterm came I made sure to study hard for it. I wouldn't say I studied too much for the exam but it was not as nerve-wracking as I had anticipated it to be. However, that class has at the very least reminded me that pharmacy suits me better than law does. I think a reason why some pharmacy students may find pharmacy law intimidating or difficult is that it requires a different frame of mind than our other pharmacy school courses do.


During our spring break the APhA Annual Meeting and Expo was held in Washington DC. It was my first time going to a national pharmacy convention and in overall it was an interesting experience. There were not only pharmacists from all over the country but pharmacy students too. Some events we had to attend were discussions as to what issues we as pharmacy students wanted to support that would potentially, later on, help shape the profession of pharmacy. We had to attend these events since we wanted to get reimbursed through the school for our costs of attending the conference. There was an expo, where various pharmacies had booths & freebies. Also branches of the federal government related to pharmacy e.g. FDA, IHS etc, and pharmaceutical companies were there showing off their latest products. There was even a booth there promoting grapefruit juice and also various other pharmacy organizations had booths there too. One of the interesting programs at the convention was a student information showcase on PGY1 (post-graduate year 1) community pharmacy residencies. This branch of pharmacy residencies is smaller than the more widely known PGY1 residencies that are done in a hospital setting. Going to such an event and seeing all the various possibilities for a pharmacist is a great way to become enthusiastic again about the field of pharmacy.

Giving Back

Wow is it already February? This semester is in full swing now. I have already taken my first exam too and I am currently studying for my second one. Besides exams another big thing for me personally that came to fruition was the Jubilee Kitchen Health Fair. It was a health fair held at a local soup kitchen here in Winchester that I organized with the help of many other people. As pharmacists we are in a field of work that is often about directly interacting with patients, and by volunteering we not only benefit the people we serve but we also hone our patient interaction skills.

We had been planning this health fair since November and to see it finally happen was great! The health fair was a collaborative effort between our school's chapters of Rho Chi, APhA-ASP, and SVSHP. Our target population may have little, if any access to health care, so the few services and brochures that we did provide were greatly appreciated. Initially we were unsure of whether or not they would be receptive to us. We didn't wear our white coats, so that we would seem more friendly and approachable. That, and our smiling faces, and helpful volunteers aided us in attracting about 80 people. Our most popular stations were our blood pressure screenings and our free giveaway table. Although going to a doctor and getting a prescription may not be a viable option for all of the patients we saw, as pharmacists we don't have to just rely on drug recommendations. Our educations are also about recommending non-drug lifestyle changes. The smiles and words of gratitude we received were truly appreciated. It felt like one of those days where I was having a real positive impact on other people. I hope that even after I leave for my rotations this event will be held and made even better than it started out to be.

Last Semester of Classes

So last week was the first week of my last semester of classes ever! If you got a little confused by that last statement, I am basically saying I am almost done with pharmacy school classes! The classes that I have this semester consist of: pharmacy law, sterile compounding, patient assessment II, ICARE: GI/nutrition, ICARE: neuro/psychiatry, ICARE: musculoskeletal, institutional practice elective, and pharmacokinetics and pharmacogenetics III. So although this will be my last semester of classes it will not be my easiest.

In addition to classes some of the organizations I am involved in are also busier in the spring. A major example is Kappa Epsilon. This past week has been Greek Week at pharmacy school. At SU, pharmacy fraternities are not allowed to recruit new members until the spring semester. On the first day of Greek Week we have an event called Round Robin where interested 1st and 2nd year pharmacy students get a brief introduction to all three different fraternities that we have. Then each fraternity hosts an event on its own on a separate date so that prospective members get a better idea of what each one is about. Kappa Epsilon had a luau theme on Tuesday night with plenty of good food to enjoy and various activities that allowed the interested students to mingle with existing members. Although I think we should have done the limbo before we ate all that food.


Another organization I am involved with is Rho Chi. Rho Chi is an honors fraternity that recruits the top 20% of the P2 class during the spring semester of pharmacy school. In the not too distant future we will be sending invitations to these smart pharmacy students to join. This weekend we are holding a health fair in conjunction with the APhA-ASP (American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Student Pharmacists). This health fair will be held at a local soup kitchen here in Winchester, where our target population probably does not receive proper health care. So it will be interesting to see how we can help them. I hope this will be a mutually beneficial experience, in that this under served population gets some health advice and that we pharmacy students can improve on our patient interaction skills.


Besides all this we will be finalizing our rotations for the upcoming P4 year. So as you can imagine although this will be my last semester of classes, it will be a very busy one.

Winter Break 2009

Another semester has gone by, in fact my last didactic fall semester has come to an end. Now I am on winter break for another 3 more weeks. Thankfully finals week wasn't too bad, since our pharmacokinetics and professional practice management course finals were noncumulative. There was a brief snow scare that would have made things more complicated if our exams would have had to be rescheduled but thankfully it didn't end up having an impact on our exams.

I recently found out that 3 of my fourth year rotations will be taking place at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which is something that I am extremely excited about. The closer I get to fourth year rotations the more enthusiasm I have. I don't have much to say about school now that we are on break. So Happy Holidays to all!

Extremely Thankful This Thanksgiving

One of the biggest things I am thankful for this year is getting my first choice for P4 year rotation cluster of Baltimore! On Tuesday right before we all headed off in our separate ways to enjoy Thanksgiving with our families and friends, e-mails were sent out to all P3 students notifying us of where we would spend our last year in pharmacy school. As I had mentioned in my earlier posting I was very anxious to see where I would end up, especially since there were rumors going around that some people would not get any of their top 3 choices. So when the e-mails were sent out on Tuesday lots of drama was to be seen. Some like me were ecstatic to get their rotation assignments, while others were caught by surprise due to their unexpected assignments. A quick peek at Facebook revealed who was sticking around in Winchester and who would have to move out come May. In a few weeks we will be deciding on the exact sites we want to go to within our rotation clusters.

But before I can get too excited about this upcoming May, there are a couple of weeks left in this semester and there is still all of spring semester too. When we return from Thanksgiving break we will have one more week of classes that will involve papers and presentations but thankfully no more tests (the university has a policy that professors are not allowed to give us tests the week before final exams). Some final exams will be cumulative and some will not be. Whenever I sit down to study for my cumulative finals it amazes me how much we covered in a semester and how quickly we have reached the end of the semester.

As always many, if not all, of our final exams will be on Perception, a computer program that locks you out of all other programs while it is in use. Since most of the exams are multiple choice, Perception can tell you what your grade is as soon as you submit your answers. I have mixed feelings about this. Sometimes I like having a period of not knowing how I did because the exam was hard and I have the mentality of "ignorance is bliss". But then again many other times knowing how I did instantaneously makes me feel like I can move on, past how I did (good or bad). Another good point of Perception is that it allows professors to see how students do statistically on exams. For example they can look at one specific question and see that only 25% of students selected the correct answer. This causes professors to evaluate whether or not the question was fair or not and if they deem it to be an unfair question then they may toss the question out. In this case I would say technology can be a student's friend.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

On pins and needles

This past week many P3s were meeting with the experiential learning coordinator to discuss their P4 year of rotations. I personally started thinking about rotations from the beginning of pharmacy school but especially since the first day of our P3 year. Rotations are where we get practical experience in the pharmacy world. We start to apply and utilize all the pharmacy education we have had for the past 3 years. It’s also the year where many people firmly decide what they want to do with their pharmacy careers. Experiences in the community setting may lead one to pursue a career as a retail pharmacist, while others may have wonderful experiences working in the hospital setting. The first step of planning for our P4 year rotations is deciding where we want to do our rotations based on geography. The school has 6 geographical clusters to choose from. Some are more competitive than others, so waiting to hear where one will be located is a tense process. Hopefully by Thanksgiving break geographical assignments will be posted and the next phase of planning for rotations can start. I myself have this constantly in the back of my mind and I need to remind myself to focus on my current courses instead of worrying about rotations.

Speaking of future steps to becoming a pharmacist, a major one is taking the NAPLEX. The NAPLEX is taken after graduating from pharmacy school and is an absolute necessary requirement to being a licensed pharmacist. Recently the school announced that recent the 2009 graduates had a 100% pass rate in taking the NAPLEX exam. It is now two years in a row that all Shenandoah pharmacy graduates have passed the NAPLEX during the May to August testing window! It’s always good to know that our education here at Shenandoah has fully prepared us for standardized exams like the NAPLEX.

Business school or pharmacy school?

Part of the curriculum here at BJD involves courses that are not so heavy on the scientific or even healthcare aspect of pharmacy, but rather the business side of things. I personally have always had an aversion to business. I understand its importance but would rather leave that to someone else to worry about. I would prefer to focus my energy on the healthcare side of pharmacy. Now that I have stated my biases, at times I feel like many of the topics we cover are focused on business principles rather than pharmacy principles.

For example currently we have a class titled “Professional Practice Management”. I think its name could easily be changed to “Business Management”. Much of the lectures we have had in this class make me wonder at times if I have mistakenly enrolled in a business class. Case in point some titles of our lectures in that class are: “Business Plan—Location Analysis”, “Marketing”, and “Inventory Control” among others. In fact a major assignment for this class is a group project where we must come up with a detailed business plan for opening up an independent pharmacy. In this project we tie together the various elements we have been presented about the business side of pharmacy. Some parts of this project are more interesting to me e.g. designing a lay-out for our pharmacy, while others make me grateful that this is a group effort and not just me working on it. For anyone who is interested in owning and operating an independent pharmacy or even working in the business area of pharmacy for a large pharmacy corporation then these kinds of assignments and courses should be very welcoming. I on the other hand have to remind myself that while I highly doubt that I will be operating my own independent pharmacy in the future, who knows one day I may find this information very valuable.


Among other things like the P2 class, our P3 class has an exam every week from now until Thanksgiving Break. I personally greatly appreciate the spaced out exams (it creates much less stress). In fact we will be having our first ICARE Hematology/Oncology exam this week. Like our other ICARE courses, we had been expecting a bonus quiz to earn a few extra points for cushioning our midterm grades. However, by today many people had given up hope that we would get one. Yet we were surprised with one first thing in class. I wish I could say that the material on the pop bonus quiz was stuff I knew inside and out, however that was not the case. On a brighter note, the bit of studying I had done paid off a little. So between now and Friday I will have blood and cancer on my mind in anticipation of our exam.

Thankfully Phi Delta Chi will be hosting “Carnival for a Cause” right after the exam, where they will be raising money for St. Jude Children’s Hospital. One of the things I am truly looking forward to is making my own caramel apple. But I think the highlight will be seeing a professor get a pie in his or her face. At one point or another I think all students after an exam fantasize about professors getting hit in the face with a pie.

Preparing for serious situations and fighting breast cancer

Well I know it’s been a while since my last blog post so before it gets any later I guess it’s time for an update of what P3 year has been like so far. Last time I wrote about being in the middle of midterms. Right now is a nice time in the school year, where we don’t have any immediate exams so my days are not all about studying for an upcoming midterm. With that said though, it would be naïve to think that even though there is not an imminent exam I can completely ignore schoolwork. I still have to study new material as it is being taught and not leave it to day long cram sessions before the exam, otherwise I would be setting myself up to do poorly.

Thankfully after all the intense mid-term studying we had Fall Break, where we have a Monday and Tuesday off. Some people spend this time just catching up on sleep and life, others like me travel to other places leaving all thoughts of pharmacy school behind for a little while. I went up to visit friends in Minnesota, which although it was colder than expected (they had snow even with their trees’ leaves still being green) I had a good time nonetheless. On the way back from Minnesota I witnessed an interesting and intense situation.

My flight out of Minnesota was bright and early at 7 am. Getting there proved to be a little difficult since there was an accident on the main road to the airport, but after all my rushing and running I made it onto the plane in the nick of time. As the plane was taxiing down the runway to take off the lady in front of me started to tap an elderly woman sitting next to her to wake her up. However the elderly woman was not responding, the younger woman even called out her name several times but the woman would not come to. Then the younger woman was calling for help with a panic in her voice that I have rarely heard before. The flight attendants rushed over and the younger woman explained that she felt the elderly woman all the sudden shake and then go unconscious and how the elderly woman was unable to wake-up. So the flight attendants immediately asked if there was a doctor or nurse on board and thankfully there was. The nurse came over from her seat and saw that the lady had a pulse and was breathing. By now the pilot had been contacted and asked to return to the gate so that paramedics could come on board. At one point the elderly lady did regain consciousness and when she was asked if she knew where she was she did respond “airplane”. But when the paramedics were transferring her to a wheelchair, she lost consciousness a second time. This experience taught me that one should be confident in the first aid training and CPR techniques that one is taught. In situations like mine it may be possible that there is no nurse or physician around to help and someone else may need to step in. Pharmacists should be prepared not just for routine patient encounters but also urgent encounters such as this one.

Later on this past week I helped fellow pharmacy students with their training for the real world. In an effort to better prepare pharmacists for encountering patients first year pharmacy students take part in a patient counseling assessment as part of a communications course. They are told to look-up information about a certain drug, such as: route of administration, frequency of dosage, indication, side effects, storage, etc. One of the organizations that I am a part of, Rho Chi, had practice patient counseling sessions with the first year students. From my previous experience I know that with practice people become more confident and thus do better on the actual patient counseling assessment, which is why we decided to offer such a service to the first year students. I firmly believe that in order to improve pharmacy as a profession we need to help one another be better individual pharmacists and this was one way to do so.

Last but not least this short week ended with Kappa Epsilon’s Annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month Dinner. This is a dinner where we raise funds to donate to a breast cancer charity. We also had a breast cancer survivor come and speak about her experience. Many people work hard to put this event together as was evident by the decorations and coordination present. Breast cancer is a platform issue for Kappa Epsilon, so not only do we have this dinner but we also sell t-shirts. At health fairs we even provide informative pamphlets about breast cancer and the proper way to conduct a self-exam and other facts to be aware of in regards to breast cancer. I think the dinner turned out quite well. I even left with a free vase of lovely flowers.

In the midst of midterms

It has been a while since I last wrote, but it has been a busy last few days. Right now as P3s we are in the midst of our first round of midterms. So far we have had 2: one in our ICARE Endocrinology/Reproduction (ICARE Endo/Repro) class and another in ICARE Infectious Disease. The ICARE Endo/Repro exam was all about diabetes and a little about hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism and adrenal gland issues. Our ICARE Infectious Diseases exam was all about bugs and drugs. Whoever came up with the naming scheme for the various microbes out there did not think of us poor students who would be required to learn all those names.

Both of these exams were computerized exams. In undergrad I never had computerized exams, so it took some getting used to when I first got to SU. I am the kind of test taker that underlines, circles and crosses things out on my exam, so not being able to do that was a big change. At first I was intimidated by not being able to use my good old techniques for taking tests. However, they do give us scratch paper to write things on during the exam if we want to. I remember after my first computerized exam I felt better about taking tests on a computer. Honestly though, I would prefer the old paper and pencil versions. A benefit or drawback (depending on how you think you did) of computerized exams are that you get your grade as soon as you click a little button labeled “Submit” and then your grade pops up with all the mistakes you made. And then immediately you proceed to chastising yourself for stupid mistakes made or rejoice in the fact that you did so well.

So that’s it for now, sorry it’s shorter than normal but I’ve got more exams to study for.

Blood Pressure and Parking Issues… What a Week!

Here at BJD we have a new course called “Standardized Patient Assessment Laboratory I”. It’s not a brand new course, but really a merging of two courses that were previously taught. In this lab we practice writing SOAP notes and learn new assessment skills. This week the skill we were working on was blood pressure. Now my past experiences at taking someone’s blood pressure has always been to hook up the patient to an automatic machine that pretty much did everything for me as long as the cuff was properly placed on the patient’s arm. In this class though the professors expected us to be less reliant on technology (for once) and to take the blood pressure with a stethoscope and a syphgmomanometer (don’t ask me to pronounce that).

I was kind of excited about this because it would be my first chance to legitimately use my brand new stethoscope that had been sitting in my closet for a while. So when it came time to actually take the blood pressure I executed the overall technique quite well, but for one hitch…I couldn’t actually hear the blood rushing back into the blood vessels when I was releasing the pressure from the cuff. Unfortunately that is not a minor detail, since without actually hearing the necessary sounds, even if I do everything else completely correctly, it won’t matter. So my poor partner had her blood pressure taken more than once, while each time I earnestly listened for the “thud” sound that I was supposed to hear. That is definitely a skill that I will be getting more practice in. So if you see me walking around with a stethoscope and a syphgmomanometer, you have been warned.

For another one of my courses, “Leadership by Design”, I am required to answer three questions on a daily basis. One of them is “What surprised me today?” Some days I honestly don’t have anything to say. Well on Tuesday I had something to write: cars in the parking lot were being ticketed in what I think is the first time I ever remember any cars being ticketed here at BJD. The level of upset and surprise was evident on people’s immediate Facebook status updates. Cars without a Shenandoah University (SU) parking permit were being ticketed and unfortunately that was a great deal of cars. One of the reasons that not everyone bought a parking permit is that our pharmacy school is located on a different side of town than the main campus, so they didn’t see a need to buy a parking permit since we don’t really use the main campus parking lots. Unfortunately this is an example of a disconnect that exists between main campus and the Health Professions Building (HPB), where not only the pharmacy school is located but also other health related majors too. Our location is close to Winchester Medical Center (WMC) which not only for us students is an ideal location, but also for the faculty whose practice sites are the WMC. On the other hand it has the drawback of being detached from the main campus.

Last but not least I wanted to mention the departure of one of the best professors I have had thus far at BJD, Dr. Phipps. In my P2 year he taught Pharmacology and a course called ICARE: Cardiology (a therapeutics and pharmacology course about diseases related to the cardiovascular system). At first it took a while to get used to his teaching style since he didn’t rely on PowerPoint presentations the way many other professors here at BJD do. But once I got used to that I really felt like I was learning a great deal from him. What I think made him a good professor was not only his skill at conveying his knowledge of pharmacology and cardiovascular issues but his fairness as well. He did his best to stay true to whatever promises he made. This week we had our last lecture with him in another course. Next week he will be leaving BJD to join the faculty at another university, their gain is our loss.

Outside of class

Another week has gone by, although this one seemed faster than most since we had Labor Day off. This week was filled with all our typical classes and at the moment nothing really stands out to mention from class. So I think I will talk about activities that occurred outside of class this time.

On Thursdays we have something called “Seminar Hour” where no pharmacy students have class at that time so that they can attend an organization’s presentation or activity. There are various organizations that are active here at BJD, from the professional e.g. APhA-ASP (American Pharmacists Association-Academy of Student Pharmacists) to the fraternities e.g. Kappa Epsilon and others. Every week a different organization hosts the seminar hour. This Thursday APhA-ASP was hosting. They had Cindy Warner, President Elect of VPhA (Virginia Pharmacists Association) and Tim Musselman, Executive Director of VPhA come and talk to us about what VPhA does and what we as students can do to become active with this state level organization that represents pharmacists of all fields. In addition to that they also came to present Jamie Larson, Michelle Chandler, Julie Horak and I with a plaque for winning the state-wide Self Care Competition.

The Self Care Competition was where we represented BJD and competed against Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy, Hampton University School of Pharmacy and Appalachian College of Pharmacy. The competition was held back in August at VPhA’s Annual Convention in Virginia Beach, VA. So the four of us were very excited and dressed up ready to be presented with our plaque… but there was no plaque. For some reason the plaque wasn’t ready yet. So we just took our pictures with the representatives of VPhA and sat back in our seats empty-handed. At least we took pictures at the competition to prove we had won. Since we won this past year, it can now be said that every Virginia pharmacy school has won the Self Care Competition at least once.

Later that same day was the Greek Olympics. At BJD we have three pharmacy fraternities: Kappa Epsilon, Phi Delta Chi and Kappa Psi. I personally am a member of Kappa Epsilon, so if I do seem biased towards them there’s a reason for it. Every fall we hold Greek Olympics, where all three fraternities and anyone from the P1 class (first year pharmacy students) who wants to participate, compete in outdoor games. The first year pharmacy students are their own separate team because they are not recruited to join any fraternities until the spring semester of their first year. So on Thursday practically everyone who was a member of one of the three fraternities was wearing their fraternity’s t-shirt, Greek letters were everywhere. The games we played consisted of a three-legged relay race, hula hooping, egg holding relay race, water balloon toss, spinning with your head on the bat then running relay race (if you know the official name please enlighten me), and the classic tug of war. Last year Phi Delta Chi had won, so there was an air of competitiveness between us (Kappa Epsilon) and Phi Delta Chi. To ensure that games were fair, each fraternity’s president was keeping track of points for all the groups.

Kappa Epsilon is filled with more girls than the other fraternities but we sent out our guys to represent us in the hula hoop competition (ironic isn’t it?). Although they did respectably we ended up losing that competition (no surprise there). However we did redeem ourselves in the water balloon toss, since we came in first place in that event. Of all the games the one that gets the most competitive is tug of war. Kappa Epsilon and Phi Delta Chi were the first two groups to compete. Although I have to say Kappa Epsilon really tried, Phi Delta Chi still beat us. Overall it was a day of friendly competition that ended with Phi Delta Chi winning the whole thing again, but we placed a respectable second. There’s always next year!

Earning Labor Day Off

I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to Labor Day as much as I did this year. I think this year was the first time in a long time that school was busy enough that I feel I have earned having a Monday off. The amount of material we covered in these first 2 weeks was enough to earn us a bonus pop quiz or two. Though thankfully, our quiz in Infectious Disease ICARE (an intense therapeutics and pharmacology course) wasn’t really a “pop” quiz, since Dr. Johnson warned us that it would be coming.

Given that we did get fair warning I think everyone in the class studied hard for that first bonus quiz. Since the quiz was on Dr. Newton’s (a professor that has been with the pharmacy school since day 1 and one of our first professors) material, he gave us our quizzes in his trademark green alternating with white sheets. He does this so that even if you are tempted to cheat, it wouldn’t do you any good, since your neighbors will have quizzes different from yours (not that he really believed we would cheat, but more so to remove the temptation to do so). He was a professor we had in our P1 year, so seeing those green and white sheets again for a moment made me realize how far I’d come since my first year. So anyway we answered the dozen or so questions, hopeful that our studying would have helped us earn a few bonus points. Unfortunately however, we later learned that the most bonus points we could earn was 1 point regardless if we answered all the questions correctly or just the minimum of five questions. Yeah that caused a minor stir, since many felt that the amount of studying they put into it should have been rewarded with more bonus points.

Something that probably caused an even bigger stir was the school’s final decision regarding how to handle final exam rescheduling for students who would miss some final exams in order to attend ASHP’s (American Society of Health-system Pharmacists) Mid-year convention in Las Vegas. Initially as the secretary for SVSHP (Student chapter of the Virginia Society of Health-system Pharmacists, a branch of ASHP at our school) I had sent out an inquiry as to how many students were interested in attending the convention. I got back dozens of replies, however many students were reluctant to make a firm commitment because of not knowing how the missed finals would be handled. I know many students hoped for the finals being given earlier, so that they could go to the convention without the dark cloud of studying for finals hanging over them while they were in Las Vegas. But when the school formally decided that only two days of finals would be excused and those missed finals (which for the P3 class was a total of 3 finals) would all have to be made up on the Saturday right before winter break, many students were upset. So when I sent out the next e-mail asking “who was still interested in going?”, not surprisingly many students no longer were. I personally do hope to do a residency and believe that by going in my P3 year I will be better prepared for next year when I will be formally applying. So the school’s decision to lump three exams all on one day really didn’t help my dread of finals week. I think I found a way to make it work, but until I buy that ticket to Vegas and actually register for the conference, nothing is set in stone. Right now I am thinking that I’ll probably stay one day less than I originally planned to in Vegas, so that I only need to make up one exam as opposed to three, since the thought of having three exams in one day, is just asking for unnecessary stress and study-induced insomnia.

Another contributing factor to why I looked forward to this long weekend was the fact that I felt like I had spent a lot of time in meetings this past week. I think being involved in school in non-academic ways makes one a well-rounded person and enriches the whole college experience. So I don’t mean to sound overwhelmed by saying there were many meetings. Since it is the beginning of the year the first meetings mostly consisted of: welcome back + here is what we plan to do. Right now at this point in time it feels like this will be a busy year and hopefully I can add “interesting” to that too.

Back for P3 year

Hi!

Monday was the first day of my P3 year here at BJD School of Pharmacy at Shenandoah University. It almost seems like it has taken a while to get here but then again it seems like just yesterday when I first got to Winchester.

I came from the suburbs of DC, where life was different for me. I didn’t come straight from undergrad, I decided to work in a pharmacy for a year before I came back to school. I went to school outside of DC (kindergarten through all of undergrad). My undergrad years were at a big state school right outside of DC that was very different from SU. So when I first got here I remember wondering: would I be able to adjust to a small private school in a smaller town. Now without any hesitation I can say that I think I have adjusted quite well (although I will be the first to admit that I miss the DC area, but being only 90 minutes away, that’s easily remedied).

What I came to realize over time was that a smaller school allows me to really get to know the people around me, from my classmates to my professors. That individualized attention was something I found lacking in a big university. Now here at my third year of pharmacy school, when I walk by former professors they say hi to me by name (whereas in the big university at most I would get was a smile from a former professors when I would walk by).

Monday morning started bright and early with what was supposed to be laptop exchange. As P3s we trade in our poor abused laptops for a new school issued laptop. We were told to be at the laptop exchange at 8 am. So shortly before 8 am, I and other pharmacy classmates were in line waiting…and waiting. Finally at 8:15 someone came by who was able to at least reach the laptop guys and then informed us that they were on their way and would be there in 15 more minutes. Well 15 more minutes went by and still no laptop guys. Since our 9 am class would be starting soon, I figured I’d go to class and just switch my laptop later.

Our first P3 class was Patient Assessment I, which was about patient documentation and SOAP notes. SOAP notes…something that as a pharmacy student you will not be able to escape, so make sure you are comfortable writing them. At first, writing a SOAP note is like being thrown a mix of useful and useless information that you have to dig your way through to find the relevant information to correctly write it. With more practice it should seem less and less like a puzzle.

In between classes I along, with many others switched our laptops and rushed back to our next class which had already started. But it was okay since our next class was Professional Practice Management, which was just a nice and quick review of the syllabus and schedule to come. We were done before I even had time to get distracted.

Last class of the day was ICARE Endo/Repro, which is a part of a sequence of classes where pathophysiology of diseases and the relevant therapeutics are taught. These classes are not to be taken lightly (aka no starting to study the night before the exam). The first lecture of this course covered diabetes, a disease state which seems to be increasingly common. Anyone who has worked in the retail setting has probably seen at least hundreds of prescriptions related to this disease state. I personally have helped out at a few of our school’s APhA diabetes clinics so knowing more about this disease state makes me feel that I will be better informed to help future patients.

So that wraps up most of my first day of P3 year and I already feel like it is only going to get busier.