Hi everyone! My name is Alex, and I have a priorities problem. (Hi Alex!)
One of the things that comes with starting a new job and living in a new place means you get to reassess your priorities. This is especially true for me, since I have had to reassess my priorities every single month since July. Let me explain.
I talk about my schooling occasionally, but I felt like this would be an opportune time to kind of break into my personal life a bit and explain why I didn’t have any content this week.
I am currently a pharmacy student at Ohio Northern University. I am in my sixth year of schooling. Most pharmacy programs are like Medical School programs – you do a four year bachelor’s degree and then apply to Pharmacy School and go to another 4 years of education. Ohio Northern is a bit different, because it crams four years of bachelor’s arts & science courses into two years. This is, as you could gather, a fairly time-intensive portion of my education.
At the end of May, I will graduate and become a Doctor of Pharmacy. I will stop being Mr. Alex Hoffman and start being Dr. Alex Hoffman; I will go on to practice by completing licensure, which means I will have to prove my credentials to the State Board of Pharmacy and then pass a two-part exam. After passing that exam, I can be the guy who manages your child’s antibiotic therapy at the hospital, the person who works with you at your doctor’s office to manage your long-term diseases like diabetes or high blood pressure. I can be the guy that makes sure that your grandparent’s or parent’s nursing home is managing medications correctly or I can even be the guy that dispenses medications to you at your local Walgreens or CVS. I will be able to immunize you and your children, I will be able to save you money on your health care, and I, most importantly, will save your life by preventing medication errors and interactions.
In order to graduate with a Doctor of Pharmacy degree (or PharmD, as it is often called), I have to complete an entire of experiential education. Each month, I a start a new job with a different pharmacist as a mentor. These pharmacists work in a multitude of settings, and give pharmacy students practical use of their skills to reinforce knowledge learned in the classroom. This means that each month, I have an extremely different work load depending on what my duties are at the pharmacy I am at.
This month, I am doing infectious disease management at a large children’s hospital. I wake up at 5AM, start work at 6AM, and am exceedingly happy to leave before 6 PM the same night. So, since I spend a remarkable amount of time throughout the week at my job site, my priorities have to change a bit.
Considering I only get about 3 hours of free time each day to spend as I choose, I have to assign that time fairly carefully. And while I love to blog about manga, I love to READ manga more. So the times when I would read and then write about manga, now I just read manga instead.
Please forgive the content-lite mode of the blog until April. I promise that I will try to get things posted.
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In the meantime, the next time you think about yelling at your pharmacist because you had to wait 18 minutes for a prescription, try to understand that every day we have to assess our priorities; he or she probably would have rather gotten your prescription to you 100% safely and correctly than to have missed a mistake that made you sick.
