Wow! Where do I begin? My first semester of pharmacy school was by far more challenging than I would have ever expected. The test were hard. The quizzes were hard. The lectures were long. And would you believe, I loved every single bit of it. Yeah, it was absolutely amazing.
I think I studied--on average--around 3-4 hours a day, and even more on the weekends. Consequently, I know lots about drug chemistry, drug metabolism and the mechanism of action of several drugs. I've even learned tons about diabetes, high blood pressure, patient interviewing, and, how to calculate IV doses.
And as much as I love talking about those things, I would hate to sit here and just ramble on about everything I've learned this semester. Instead, I just want you guys to know that I am going to love being a pharmacist!! I'll recap it in, hopefully, one page or less....
The semester started off with a week long orientation entitled Foundation of Pharmacy. The name is pretty much self-explanatory and should give you all the insight needed to figure out what we learned. But besides all the books, we also did some really fun activities: one of them in particular was the tower building contest. Yeah, you read that correctly. We actually got to build a tower made of marshmallows and spaghetti noodles. It was so fun!! Unfortunately, though, my team didn't win; but we did have lots of fun. We also got to watch a moc-trail, which was absolutely amazing. The lawyers and actors were just so good. Everything seemed so real. I couldn't help but sit there and watch in complete anticipation as the jury rendered their verdict. Would you believe that I was so into the thing that I actually started praying for the defendant--yeah, it was that convincing.
And, then, just like that, orientation week was over and school started--for real!! And let me just say, once it started, things got going in full swing. So much stuff was so happening so fast, if you blinked you were sure to miss something--whether it was an important email, meeting or conference. You had to always be on your toes. Which was, by the way, the first lesson I learned. No one was going to wait on you if you got a behind.
And just to give you an idea as to how quickly things were moving, listen to this: in just five weeks, we covered 17 chapters of drug chemistry. Yeah, I know what you're thinking--seems impossible, right. It was definitely a lot. But believe it or not, that was the easy part. Things soon begin to pick up even more speed. Would you believe by the end of the semester we covered a whopping 45 chapters--in just one class!!! I learned everything from basic drug chemistry to the most complicated drug metabolism.
That course, by the way, is called Drugs and Diseases--or DAD, as we refer to it. And it is insanely difficult. We pretty learn every single drug used to treat every treatable disease. The way it work is simple: over the first four semesters, we take DADs I - IV. After which, we spend the entire third year of school learning how to integrate everything we've learned in a class called Integrated Pharmacotherapy--aka IP. And then we spend our fourth and final year doing clinical rotations. And what's worse, even though we take several other classes, the DAD and IP courses are heavily weighted. So, even if we make A's in our "fluff" classes, DAD or IP can still make or break our GPAs. My point being, DAD is a pretty big deal around here.
Besides school work, though, pharmacy school has been full of other excitement. For starters, I was voted class justice this year, which is pretty much what we call our class president. I won't go into too many details about my elected role, but just know that being class justice has definitely taught me how to manage my time.
Overall, I would say the first semester of pharmacy school has been great, with a few rocky--and even scary--points along the way. The good news is, though, I finished this semester pretty strong--4.0 strong, that is!! And being as such Wende and I are planning on having a great Christmas break. When spring semester starts, I'll be sure to keep all you guys updated.
