We’ve all answered the same question at some point – “Why do you want to go to pharmacy school?”
Most of the time the answer is what we think interviewers want to hear. But we all know some of the real reasons….
We chat with Aleksey on some of these unspoken truths.
Name: Aleksey Gitelson
Position: Pharmacy Student at Wilkes University
Interview Summary
Matt [00:00:10]: Matt Paterini here with The Nontraditional Pharmacist, part of The Pharmacy Podcast Network, here with a fantastic student today, Aleksey Gitelson of Wilkes University. We’re in The Nontraditional Pharmacist Student Series, so we’re all about helping students not only learn about all the opportunities available to them in pharmacy but help them actually get there. How do you learn what path you want to take in pharmacy? What direction you want to take? So we’re going to talk to Aleksey today about some of his thoughts, his experiences in pharmacy school. Very excited to get the show started for today. Aleksey thank you so much for joining us. We’re happy to have you on the show.
Aleksey [00:00:48]: Thank you for having me.
Matt [00:00:50]: Absolutely anytime. We do enjoy talking with students because different stages of the programs and across the country, people have different experiences. So what are your primary interests in pharmacy and why?
Aleksey [00:01:06]: So going into pharmacy school I wasn’t really all that sure what I wanted to do. And a lot of the older students constantly told me oh your opinion is going to change every couple of months as you move on in the curriculum. And I was like yeah right. I was pretty confident that I was going to find something, I was going to stick to it, but they were completely right and my opinion changes constantly. So the last year or so I’ve been really interested in industry pharmacy. I have experience in a lot of other areas. So I have experience in community pharmacy. I’ve experience in hospital pharmacy, managed care pharmacy. Industry is actually the only thing I have no experience in, but I’m really interested in it just because we’ve had a lot of guest speakers coming in that work in the industry. And I’m going to be doing a summer internship this summer at Pfizer, so I’m really hoping I like it. But that’s currently what I’m focused on for right now is industry pharmacy.
Matt [00:01:59]: Sounds good, and industry can actually span, I mean as you know, span a lot of different topics within industry, whether you’re talking about pharmaceutical industry, technology industry. So why industry? You have experience in other areas, why is industry kind of the focus for you right now?
Aleksey [00:02:16]: Well again like I said, most of my experience has just been from speakers that have come in. Our IPhO, Industry Pharmacists Organization, club on campus, I’m going to be the president of that going into P3 next year. We just recently took a trip to Sanofi Pasteur, which is about an hour and a half away, and I was just really interested in the type of work that they do there and I’m really into the whole idea of, I know there’s not a lot of patient contact and I’m definitely a people person and I do like interacting with patients, but I also like the idea to use what I learned in school to affect people on a much larger scale. And then something that really drew me towards that is last year during my P1 year, we had a class called Clinical Research and Design and we basically learned about drug trials and how to interpret them and I just found that really interesting. And that’s why I’m kind of moving towards that direction.
Matt [00:03:09]: I like what you said there about affecting health care pharmacy on on a population level. That’s one of the things that as you’re looking at careers, you know it’s good to reflect and understand what it is the impact that you want to make, you know whether it’s on an individual patient level, population level, and there’s so many different opportunities available within each of those. So that’s good, plus it’s always good to get more experience in a new area that you haven’t seen before because you never know what you like and what you don’t like. So you know as you go through the traditional path of pharmacy education, what would you say is missing from formal pharmacy pducation, pharmacy school, that helps you narrow down a career that you’ll ultimately pursue after graduation?
Aleksey [00:03:58]: So good question. Something that definitely pops in mind is I think it varies a lot based on your region and specifically what pharmacy school you go to. So for example I know for industry Rutgers is huge, Rutgers is like the hub of industry pharmacy. Whereas at Wilkes, the opportunities for industry aren’t as immense, but Wilkes definitely does a great job of bringing in a lot of guest speakers. So if they hadn’t done that I wouldn’t even had the thought to go into industry, I would know nothing about it. So Wilkes does good in that regard. I think something that’s missing is I would like to see more opportunities for example, choosing IPPE rotations as you go through the curriculum. So right now, I don’t know if this is how it is everywhere, but you basically are given assigned IPPE rotations so you have to do a community one, you have to do a hospital one. I would love for there to be the option to say hey I really don’t have a huge interest in working in for example community pharmacy, could I do an industry IPPE instead? So I think having more flexibility in terms of choosing rotations would be great. I know not every school has the option to do that and a lot of it is based on requirements in order to graduate. So I don’t know how much change can happen there but that’s something that I would love to see improved.
Matt [00:05:17]: Now that’s a great idea, great point because everyone’s interested in different things. It’s like it doesn’t make sense for certain people if they know they want to pursue a certain career path to go down, you know training in a certain area, where they could spend their time better used in other in other practice settings. What about things outside of pharmacy, in the pharmacy program. I know it’s kind of a weird question but do you find that your pharmacy program offers career advice and how to choose a career path? That’s not necessarily pharmacy specific, so you know financial considerations, personal life considerations, do they work that into how you choose a career path or is that kind of on you or do you see that in the four formal training?
Aleksey [00:06:01]: So we do have one class that we just took a semester pharmacy management, it’s definitely more so focused on if you want to open a pharmacy how to manage that pharmacy. But I think something that would be good to have instead of that would be personal finances. When you graduate you start making more money than we’ve ever had in our lives, especially in college when we have no money and then you graduate, you start making money. So I think it’d be good to have personal finance classes, management classes, not so much managing a pharmacy but managing individuals, stuff like that. Insurance, that pops into my mind. If you are interested in community or even in hospital like there are positions where you have to deal with insurance. But when you graduate you’re thrown into say for example you work at CVS, you are thrown in and you have all these insurance problems that you’ve never dealt with and you don’t know what to do. So would be good to know.
Matt [00:06:51]: Yeah there’s a lot of things, I mean you know you can only do so much in a confined amount of time and in a certain program. But it sounds like you’re kind of getting a lot of different experiences. You’re earlier on in your education. What’s your approach, your personal approach for planning for after graduation. Is it get as much experience as you can and see what you like and what you don’t like? Or how are you thinking through the next couple of years into graduation?
Aleksey [00:07:20]: Yes so basically what you just said is exactly what I’ve been trying to do. Some advice that I got about a year ago, like I said when I started getting interested in industry, I got in touch with someone that went to Wilkes previously, I didn’t know him from WIlkes as he graduated several years prior, but he’s become a pretty good friend of mine and he’s been a really good mentor and something that he said was, make a LinkedIn and meet as many people as you possibly can. So I did that. And through that experience I’ve been able to just network with as many people as possible. And I’m definitely trying to get as many experiences as possible. I’ve done previous internships, again this summer I’m doing another internship. So I’m just trying to get a taste of everything because I don’t want to graduate and then not have the ability to go back and experience all this stuff.
Matt [00:08:10] Yeah. I mean the combination there of having the experiences yourself personally and then having all the connections and the people to know in those areas, you put those two together and that’s how you get successful career options, you know a number of different career options, and you are able to pick which one you like the best. Which one best fits you. So you know in thinking about that, how do you see your pharmacy career helping you to achieve what you want in your personal life? So depends on you personally, but how do you see pharmacy being a vehicle to help you achieve that?
Aleksey [00:08:44]: Personally I would love to have a career that is rewarding to me, that I feel like I’m definitely contributing a lot. I feel like I’m using what I went to school for so long to learn to help other people. So I think naturally any health care position will offer that. At the same time, everyone wants to make a good living and I think pharmacy, that’s something that isn’t really talked about, especially when you’re interviewing to get into pharmacy school. When they ask, “Why do you want to go to pharmacy school?” Obviously you’re not supposed to say I want to make a lot of money, but that’s that’s definitely a big reason that people go into medicine, whether it’s pharmacy or being a physician or or a nurse or physician assistant. So I think pharmacy will offer that. And pharmacy is one of the most flexible fields that I didn’t even know of when I went into pharmacy school. But I’ve been experiencing that as I’ve gone through it and there’s really options to do whatever you want. There’s so many different avenues to go down. Whether you want to work certain hours of the day or just anything like that. I’m not exactly sure what I want yet. But I am definitely confident that pharmacy was a good field to go into to figure that sort of stuff out.
Matt [00:09:56]: No you’re spot on. I mean not only in terms of the work that you do, you have all kinds of opportunities in all different types of practice settings, business side, clinical side, you name it. But then also on the practical day-to-day living type things as well, the money you can earn, the hours you can work, and all that. It definitely plays a role but I think you’re right, people don’t talk about that. It’s a huge component, I mean obviously this is a career, it’s to make a living. So talking about the financial aspects is a key component of that. So it’s good that you recognize it. It sounds like you have a great plan you know moving through pharmacy school and your education. I would be curious to hear where you see the profession of pharmacy just in general heading in the future.
Aleksey [00:10:47]: I have a lot of bold predictions that I don’t know how realistic a lot of them are. One area that I definitely see pharmacy moving into is like for example, I had a rotation at a telepharmacy and when I went to pharmacy school I had no idea what that was. But everyone is so used to getting things on demand, right on their phones, myself included, that I think a lot of people are saying mail order is becoming such a huge thing. I think pharmacists will be responsible for being able to answer people’s questions right off the bat. If you get mail order, you’re not experiencing walking into a pharmacy and then being counseled by the pharmacist, which is what we’re taught to do in pharmacy school. So I could see technology playing a huge role into how pharmacists careers change moving forward. And at the same time I think healthcare in general is going to change. I think interprofessional exercises, interprofessional teams are going to be playing a huge role. We’re already doing that here at Wilkes. We have different events every semester that we go and we have exercises with medical students, nursing students, and they put us in these situations where you have to really quickly and efficiently learn how to how to build a healthcare team. Today I don’t really think health care works quite like that, but I think in the future pharmacists are definitely going to be recognized more so for the services they can provide. And I just think that’s the way health care should go and I think that’s where it will go.
Matt [00:12:14]: Aleksey Gitelson of Wilkes University, thank you so much for taking the time with us today on The Nontraditional Pharmacy Student Series. Please like, comment, share this post with your network. We look forward to talking with everyone next time on The Nontraditional Pharmacist, part of The Pharmacy Podcast Network. Aleksey thanks again and take care. We’ll talk to everyone next time.
Aleksey [00:12:36] Thanks for having me.