Personal Statement

Being so shy and lacking confidence as a child growing up, it truly is amazing how I ended up as a pharmacist and educator now. As a child, I remembered looking forward to going to school and always eager to learn something new and exciting. What will I learn today? How can I apply what I learned in the future? In a way, that is how pharmacy is. The world of medicine and how we treat patients is always evolving. Now only that, pharmacy is a combination of so many disciplines including biology, chemistry, physiology, anatomy, just to name a few. Pharmacists are considered the medications experts in the medical field, but it is an overwhelming and nearly impossible task to just memorize every single medication. It is my duty as a pharmacy

My method of teaching does not involve simple memorization, but rather, I like to tie other disciplines that make up pharmacy, together, to help interns learn about different medications. I also prefer to have interns get involved with the day-to-day activities of a pharmacy technician and pharmacist to fully appreciate what it means to treat patients as part of the pharmacy team. This way, not only will interns understand medications, but they will also be able to apply it in their future careers.

As a pharmacy student and intern in the past, I quickly realize that there is much more to pharmacy than just transferring medications from a large bottle into a smaller bottle. When taken, medications are a foreign object in your body and how your body reacts to medications and how medications affect your body is the premise behind pharmacy. As a

When an intern comes to my practice site, they are always a part of the pharmacy team. I remember I was essentially “free help” in some of my past rotations when I was an intern. I didn’t learn much in those rotations and it was difficult for me to apply it for my future career. When I became a pharmacy preceptor, I do my best to prevent my interns from becoming “free help.” A pharmacy rotation should always encourage interns to learn and how they can apply their experience in their future career. My practice site is within an acute care hospital; therefore, there can be a variety of different medications many interns in the community setting may not have seen before. So, I allow interns to shadow different pharmacy technicians and different pharmacists, besides myself, to fully understand how an institutional pharmacy functions. A pharmacist will always have supervisory responsibilities in addition to clinical expertise; thus, I also invite many of my IPPE interns to come back as APPE interns, so that they can teach current IPPE interns to help strengthen their leadership skills. It is not always possible to have IPPE interns come back as APPE interns due to the lottery nature of pharmacy rotation selection, but when it does happen, I find that interns who have experience as both an IPPE and APPE intern within my hospital setting have a better-rounded experience and we as the