Last Friday, March 15th was ASHP Match Day. For those of you not familiar with Match Day, it’s the day when P4 students find out if they’ve been matched with a residency and if so, where they’ll be spending the next and arguably most important year of their careers. Needless to say, the day is quite exciting and emotions run very high throughout the process.

While I have not gone through the Match process, as I am only a P2 student currently, I thought this would be an opportune time to talk about how Ohio State prepares you for a residency so that our students have the best chance of getting placed at their preferred sites.

Residency application is a very competitive process, with only 64% of applicants nation-wide getting placed into a program this year. At Ohio State, we are working on skills from day 1 that will prepare you to be a competitive candidate for residencies. During the transitions course at the beginning of your P1 year, you start building important professional skills such as how to properly create a CV, how to handle professional correspondences, and how to prepare for interviews. These skills are incredibly useful in any hiring process, but especially so in the residency process. Our Career Services staff work extensively with us throughout the entire PharmD program to hone these skills and make sure that when we get to that residency interview, we are ready to blow them away. I can personally say that when I started pharmacy school, I had an outdated and frankly awful resume. But working with Natalie Fox (one of our amazing Career Services specialists), I was able to not only get it ready for applying to internships during school, but set it up to build on during the rest of my time in school. Career Services also sends out a weekly email with internships hiring in the area. Since experience outside of the classroom is one of the best ways to set you apart, this is a great resource as well!

Beyond this, our experiential education staff works tirelessly to match us with great rotations during all four years of pharmacy school. These rotations not only help give you the skills to be ready for a residency, but they help you decide if a residency is even for you.

My closing comment is that while there is a ton of hype around residency, and our program does a phenomenal job preparing you for it, residency is not for everyone and while growing, is still done by a minority of students. And a lot of our great programs that help prepare out students for residency prepare our students to be great job candidates as well. So whichever path you decide to go down, rest assured Ohio State will prepare you for it.

The week of Thanksgiving is a busy time around the College of Pharmacy, with professors finishing up topics to give us an uninterrupted break and students heading home for the holiday or hosting Friendsgivings in Columbus. But beyond the frenzy of the holiday, you’ll notice a lot of signs across campus with a certain letter crossed out and a lot more people wearing scarlet and grey than usual. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Rivalry Week – every year on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the Buckeyes play our arch rivals, the Michigan Wolverines. While OSU is definitely a big sports school, it reaches an exciting fever pitch during this week and campus is all caught up in the excitement. I am writing this post before the big game so I can’t say whether I’m celebrating or disappointed yet, but either way it will be an amazing game for sure!

While Rivalry Week is definitely the focal point of sports at OSU, there are tons of different opportunities to get involved in the sports culture while at OSU whether as a spectator or a participant. Parks Hall, where most PharmD courses are held, is right across the field from the Shoe, OSU’s massive football stadium. Many students get season tickets for football every year, and there are multiple seating groups of pharmacy students cheering on the Buckeyes at every game. Even though I’m not a big football fan, game days are very exciting and all of campus gets into the fun. (Just hope that you don’t have to drive anywhere during a home game!)

If you’re more of a competitor than a spectator, Intramural sports are a great way to stay active and take a break from studying. Some student organizations will make teams to compete in everything from the traditional sports like baseball to the more quirky ones like battleship (played in canoes in a pool where you try and sink your opponents boats while staying afloat) or the midwestern favorite, corn hole.

Beyond campus, Columbus has a lot of great local sports teams to check out as well. Whether you’re a hockey fan and wanna check out a Blue Jackets game or into soccer and get tickets to the Crew, there are plenty of opportunities for either. The Columbus Clippers, our minor league baseball team, even has Dime a Dog nights that a lot of students love to check out for cheap food and great company.

Even as someone who isn’t huge into sports, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the sports scene both on and off campus in Columbus and definitely encourage you to take part  if you come to OSU!

Hello everyone! One of the common questions we get as ambassadors is what our normal weeks look like as students at Ohio State. To give you and idea, of both how classes are and how we fit in everything else, I am going to walk you through what a typical week looks like for me! One thing to note – everyone’s schedule is different so this is just one possible schedule out of many.

Monday: 

-Lecture 8:30-11:30 – Monday started off with a lecture on the pathophysiology of Arrhythmias. While the material was pretty heavy, it helped that it was taught by a pharmacist who works in the Ross Heart Hospital and is a specialist in the field.
-Professional Hour 11:30-12:30 – All PharmD students have 11:30-12:30 off every day. This professional hour, I ran across the street to BistrOH to grab a quick bite with friends.
-Lecture 12:30-3:30 – We finished off Monday with a lecture on the pharmacology of anti-arrhythmic drugs and the medicinal chemistry behind how these drugs work. Throughout the lecture, we had a variety of patient cases to help us visualize how these things are applied in real life.
-Interprofessional education event 5:30-8:00 – A special event, this was a session with other health professional students focused on the opioid crisis. It was really interesting to hear the viewpoint of my future colleagues and really helped me to realize how much we will all need to work together to solve the crisis.

Tuesday:

-Work 7:00-12:30 – As mentioned in my last blog post, I work with the OSU Wexner Medical Center as an informatics intern.  Tuesday morning, I worked with some of our pharmacist specialists to standardize how we make patient progress notes. I was amazed at how diverse a range of specialists we have right across the street from the college and it was really interesting to hear from all of them how they work through their cases.
-Lab 12:30-3:30 – Lab is my favorite part of the week, class wise. Our second year lab is focussed on hospital pharmacy so this week we were compounding sterile IV bags of ceftriaxone. We also have a heavy focus on communication skills in lab so I practiced presenting therapy changes to a physician. It was great to be able to practice with one of our TAs acting as a physician and now I feel ready to do the real thing on one of my rotations.

Wednesday:

-Lecture 8:30-11:30 – More lecture! This time we learned about the therapeutics behind treating atrial arrhythmias.
-Professional Hour 11:30-12:30 – This professional hour, I went to a meeting of a brand new student organization. Bringing our grand total to 18, this new organization focuses on specialty pharmacy. They had a guest speaker who had a lot of insight into the field but most importantly – they had free food.
-Lecture 12:30-3:30 – To round out the day we talked about Venous Thromboembolism from another faculty member who also practices at the Wexner Medical Center. While we only had him for a few hours, we learned a ton about the topic and worked through some patient cases that made the material so much clearer.

Thursday:

-Work – 7:00-12:30
-Professional Hour 11:30-12:30 – This professional hour I mostly studied but also shamelessly used the excuse of supporting a good cause to get some tasty baked goods! During professional hours, student orgs sell everything from white coats to t-shirts to cupcakes. It’s a great opportunity to support some of our charities and satisfy your sweet tooth at the same time.
-Workshop 12:30-3:30 -Thursday workshop was focused on patient cases for Arrhythmias and Venous Thromboembolism. Using a team based learning approach, we talked about all the considerations that need to be made in treating these disease states. All the different specialists were there so we got to see how the team works together to prioritize and manage complex patients.

Friday:

-Workshop 8:30-11:30 – Friday workshop will focus on pharmacogenomics. I particularly am looking forward to this since it’s such a cutting edge field that even a lot of practicing pharmacists don’t know much about. The fact that we get exposure to it so early on is very exciting.
-The Circleville Pumpkin Show 2:30 -??-  Since the week can’t be all work and no play, me and some of my fellow Phi Delta Chi Brothers are going to blow off some steam at the famous Circleville Pumpkin Show! I’ve never been so I’m not entirely sure what is in store but I’ve heard they have pumpkin flavored versions of literally anything you can think of. I can’t wait to see what all I can find!

So there you have it, a week In the life of an OSU student. It’s pretty jam packed with a lot of exciting things that spice things up between lectures. I hope this gives you an idea of what it’s like here!