My interest in pharmacy sparked during my senior year of high school. I was exposed to this field due to family members that have completed pharmacy school and are now practicing retail pharmacists. It wasn’t until I selected a major for college that a collective consensus of my academic strengths and passions became clear. I selected Public Health as a major so that I could enroll in chemistry and biology courses, but also learn about population health within communities. My interests in the effects of medicinal drugs that can save lives and also ensuring the safest distribution within communities led me to become a Pre-Pharmacy student. With each year there is a rise in medical developments, and with it comes the creation of new drugs. Pharmacists …show more content…
This is where I learned what steps I needed to take to be on my path to becoming a pharmacist. One of my first undertakings in a career of pharmacy was working as a pharmacy technician at a local retail store. This is where I was able to experience firsthand that a pharmacist does more than just fill prescriptions. Customers looked to pharmacist to answer any questions or concerns they had about the medication they were taking. I learned many different ways a pharmacy operated from preparing medication for customer’s prescriptions to managing inventory and equipment, as well as keeping files of patient drug histories. I was able to learn a lot from my first pharmacy technician job and these skills helped me to secure a position as a pharmacy technician at a hospital. I quickly learned that a hospital pharmacy operates different from that of a retail pharmacy. In a hospital pharmacy, I was able to work with nurses and doctors and interact with them compared to a direct customer, and also dealt with more concentrated forms of medicine and IV medications compared to pills and prescriptions in a retail pharmacy. These two different settings made me realize a lot more about the world of pharmacy and made me confident that this is the career path I want. I learned many valuable skills and also experienced first hand how a pharmacy is important to the local community and the people it