Author: Ashley Erdmann

APPE’s – Just Around the Corner!

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This is such an exciting part of the semester for our P3 class – our fourth year APPE schedules were just released to us! It is a surreal feeling that we are finishing up on our didactic curriculum for our PharmD career. APPE’s are a great way for students to tailor their fourth year, giving them an opportunity to have rotations in areas that they have an interest in. It is also a great way for them to branch out and become immersed in things that you they are not familiar with. There are so many specialties and paths to pursue after graduation, so these rotations (and their amazing preceptors) are great resources to help us decide what we want to do! I know that my interests have greatly changed since beginning pharmacy school!

 

I am really looking forward to my rotations, most notably my longitudinal academic rotation within the College of Pharmacy! I will be helping to develop integrated patient cases for the P2 students to work on during their workshops. I have an interest in teaching, and I am excited to gain experience in this setting! I am also looking forward to my pediatric ambulatory care rotation at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and my rotation in the SICU at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center! I found our critical care module to be very interesting and I am excited to apply the information we learned in class to patients in the hospital!

 

The profession of pharmacy is changing constantly, and pharmacists are playing more of an integral role in healthcare than ever before. Whether it’s nuclear pharmacy, managed care, hospital health systems, community/independent pharmacy, ambulatory care, academia, industry, etc., where do you see yourself practicing?

Preparing for APPE’s

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Hi everyone!

I am writing to you all today to talk about preparing for your APPE year. APPE stands for Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience, and it is the final year of pharmacy school. APPE’s allow us experience nine one-month rotations in different settings to 1)  make sure that we are well-rounded, and prepared to sit for the NAPLEX and 2) help us determine which area of pharmacy we might want to pursue upon graduation. Whether that means a residency, fellowship or preparing to transition into a full-time position somewhere, your APPE’s are the best way to integrate all of the knowledge you’ve learned in your didactic curriculum into real-world experiences with real patients! Ohio State offers some really wonderful rotations, too!

One of the very first things I did to prepare for my applications was polishing up my CV.  Liz Trolli and the fantastic staff in Career Services are excellent resources for reviewing CV’s! Once the rotations were made available to us through Dr. Legg, I was able to see the application based rotations that were being offered. For those of you who do not know, Liz Trolli is the Program Manager for all of our Experiential education, and Dr. Legg is the Director of Experiential Education. Liz helps make sure that our IPPE’s are assigned to us in a way that works with our school schedule, and she also helps guide us with other important things that we need to have completed each year, like community health service hours and making sure that we submit proper documentation and forms for various things. Essentially, she ensures that we have everything completed before we can begin our APPE’s. Dr. Legg is the professor that is in charge of our entire APPE application process. She meets with every single student (often more than once) to discuss their interests to help ensure that they get rotations that will be of interest to them. She is also a great person to talk about rotations with, as she is very knowledgeable and knows a lot of the preceptors in the area, so she can give a lot of insight to different rotations.

I began working on my Letters of Intent for those applications I wanted to apply to so I could have those done fairly early. There are other rotations available that are not application based, and those get ranked in PharmAcademic. (All of this will be explained during the first few weeks of your P3 year, so don’t worry!)

As of right now, the ACPE requires that we complete two hospital rotations, two community rotations, and one ambulatory care rotation. The other four rotations are considered elective rotations, and you are able to tailor those to your individual interests!

To be honest, it’s a little stressful and overwhelming to think about these rotations, as they begin to mark the end of my pharmacy school career. To hopefully make this experience a little less stressful for you all, I have some pieces of advice:

  1. Keep  your CV up to date! This means updating your CV after every rotation and volunteer experience throughout pharmacy school. You will be thankful you did!
  2. Start a list of the various rotations you might be interested in. Do they require an application? When are they due? Keeping track of all of these things will help deadlines from creeping up on you!
  3. Decide if you want to travel out of town/out of state/out of the country for your APPE’s. There are many rotations located outside of Columbus and in various states. They are excellent opportunities, so it’s a good idea to look into all of them to see if they might be of interest to you!
  4. Double, triple check your application, LOI’s and CV! Have friends, family and faculty read over your materials before submission.
  5. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and apply for a unique rotation. For example, Ohio State has a great nuclear pharmacy rotation, which is something not a lot of students have exposure with. This is your chance to find out what you really like (if you don’t know already)!

I am excited that I am able to rank rotations and find really interesting electives. Pharmacy is such a cool profession in the sense that it is extremely multi-faceted: there are so many different practice settings that a pharmacist can immerse themselves in!

As always, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me!

Ashley

Columbus in the Fall

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Hi friends!

One of the things that I love most about about being at Ohio State is Buckeye football. There is nothing better than watching the Buckeyes play in The Horseshoe! The sound of the crowd is electrifying and captivating as the scarlet and grey barrel down the field. Friends and family come together to tailgate, eat and celebrate the Buckeyes along the Olentangy River. You can tell fall is in the air, and OSU football is in full swing!

Fall is my favorite season, and even if football isn’t your cup of tea, there is plenty to do in Columbus as the leaves become a vibrant sea of red and orange amidst the crisp air.

  • Wander down the rows of apple trees at Cherry Hawk Farm Apple Orchard – Marysville or Lynd Fruit Farm. Pick some apples to eat or to bake with!
  • Enjoy delicious coffee at Stauf’s Coffee Roasters in German Village, one of my guilty pleasures!
  • Read a book – I’m currently reading The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur, as well as The Black Book by James Patterson
  • Try out a new recipe – I love to make homemade soups and chili when the weather becomes chilly.
  • Carve a pumpkin with friends and watch scary movies!
  • Take a long bike ride through one of the many metro parks in Columbus

Whatever you decide – make sure to take time for yourself, Buckeyes!

-Ashley

ASHP Mid-Year

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Hi all!

This week I would like to talk with you about national conferences! As Victoria stated last week, pharmacy organizations such as OPA, APhA, ASHP and NCPA hold national conferences every year to showcase developments, new literature and to recognize outstanding technicians and pharmacists in their specialized fields! These conferences last several days and incorporate and attract hundreds if not thousands of attendees! It is a great way to branch out, meet new people and network with wonderful people in our profession!

In December, I was fortunate enough to attend Mid-Year, ASHP’s national conference in Orlando, FL! It was an amazing time traveling with my classmates to attend a conference focused on hospital pharmacy, which is where our passions are! (Getting out of Ohio’s cold weather was obviously a plus, too!)

National conferences host an array of activities that participants can attend such as workshops, lectures from distinguished speakers, poster presentations from pharmacy interns and pharmacy residents, as well as a Residency Showcase, which is the focus for a lot of P3 and P4 students. The Showcase shines light on many of the country’s terrific residency programs, and students have the opportunity to speak with program directors to find out more about those respective programs. As a current P2, it was neat to walk through the Showcase and learn more about the soecifics of these residency programs. I’m still undecided on what part of hospital pharmacy I would like to specialize in, so I really appreciated being able to see various programs and what they have to offer!

While we were in Orlando, we sat in on various lectures, including one about applying for residencies and the matching process, a focused lecture on a pharmacist’s soon to be role in medical marijuana, antibiotic resistance and how to combat this issue in hospitals with a push for more culture and sensitivity tests. It was refreshing to see different facets of pharmacy being addressed! It was a wonderful opportunity to attend a national conference!

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at Erdmann.13@osu.edu.

All the best,

Ashley

Find Your Balance

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Hey everyone!

This week, I would like to discuss school-life balance. It’s super important and crucial for success in pharmacy school!

Let me tell you all a bit about my experience with this:

I walked into Parks Hall on August 1, 2016, ready to tackle my first day of pharmacy school. I could not have been more excited to begin my pharmacy career as a Buckeye. The first two weeks of school kept me busy with our Transitions module where we completed an array of activities designed to help us begin our P1 year with a sturdy professional foundation. The semester then began to build upon itself, with the courses becoming progressively more integrative and challenging as the weeks went on.

When summer came, I remained pretty busy, working full time at Mount Carmel West Hospital as an inpatient intern, and traveling to Honduras on a medical brigade with PODEMOS. Even though I was busy, I was doing things that I truly enjoyed.

This year, we are learning about the pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, therapeutics and pathophysiology associated with different disease states and a pharmacist’s role in managing them. The material is manageable but challenging at times.

I am now in my fourth semester of pharmacy school, and there have been moments where I’ve felt I don’t have enough time in the day to accomplish all of the things I need to do. At times I have felt overwhelmed and frayed. I knew I needed to incorporate more balance into my daily/weekly schedule, to help keep me energized and centered. I like to play tennis, use the facilities at the RPAC and read. I really enjoy exploring and experiencing the many delicious restaurants and coffee shops that Columbus has to offer with my friends. I have noticed such a difference in my overall happiness since I started doing more things that I enjoy. It’s nice to have something fun to work towards and look forward to at the end of a busy week.

My advice to you, Buckeyes and future Buckeyes, is this:

Amidst the hustle and bustle of Parks Hall, find your balance. Find your passion and go explore it. I strongly believe it is important to create balance in your lives, which will provide you with a more well-rounded and enjoyable pharmacy experience. Go Bucks!

Best,

 

Ashley

Winter in Columbus

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Picture this: a fresh, crisp blanket of snow covers the ground under your feet as you walk to class, and you hear your boots crunch over the snow as you take each subsequent step. Snow is sprinkling over you as you are sipping on some hot coffee to perk you up on this chilly morning. The campus is quiet and serene, as if it’s just waking up for the day. This may seem like an extreme cliche, but I absolutely love winter, and I especially love winter in Columbus.

Albeit, there can sometimes be a negative vibe associated with the winter season as finals and end-of-semester project deadlines seem to sneak up out of nowhere. However, amidst the hustle and bustle of studying for final exams, there are so many activities to take part in for those well deserved study breaks.

Every year in November, the College of Pharmacy hosts its Annual Chili Cook-Off, a charity event where proceeds benefit the Charitable Pharmacy of Central Ohio. (Plug: Charitable Pharmacy is a wonderful place to get your community service hours, and students will often complete rotations and residencies there!) Student organizations, alumni and faculty bring crockpots full of their best chili recipes to battle it out and see whose is best. There are also fantastic items available at the silent auction – this year one of the items were two tickets to a home OSU game with pretty phenomenal seats!

Being from Toledo, one of my favorite holiday traditions was going to the Toledo Zoo with my family to see the Lights Before Christmas. It is very similar to Wild Lights, the wonderful light display at the Columbus Zoo! Last year, after our first semester of classes, a few pharmacy friends and I bundled up and went to the Columbus Zoo to see the lights and celebrate the end of finals week. It was fun to walk around, hot coffee in hand, and look at the twinkling lights draped against the darkness of the night sky (and relax)!

One of my favorite hobbies is to curl up with a good book, and it  seems that winter is no better time to get lost in a novel. With hundreds of books scattered around my apartment, I still can’t help but to acquire more – most notably from The Book Loft, located in German Village. It is one of the most unique places I have ever been, where every nook and cranny of the building is hiding books of every genre and interest. (They have great sales and discounts, too, which is definitely a plus!) It’s a great place to spend an afternoon perusing the shelves and finding a text that captures your attention.

Columbus has so many terrific restaurants and different types of cuisine; there is no doubt that you can find warm, delicious comfort food! A few of my favorite places are Mozart’s Cafe, Katalina’s, Schmidt’s, Press Grill, Hyde Park, Forno, AAB and Sweet Carrot. No matter what you’re in the mood for, there are options for everyone!

As final exams draw near, stop to enjoy some of the wonderful things that Columbus has to offer! You won’t be disappointed!