Kim Tran’s participation with TNP shows how taking advantage of a networking opportunity can lead to making great connections. You never know where a simple conversation will take you!

Name: Kim Tran

Position: Pharmacy Student at Oregon State University

Interview Summary

Kim [00:00:00] Hi everyone and this is Kim Tran. I am a PharmD, MBA candidate at Oregon State University and you are listening to The Nontraditional Pharmacist. I just want to start off by saying thank you so much to Matt for reaching out to me and inviting me to be on this interview. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do going into pharmacy school and that was a source of a lot of panic for me. I know a lot of other people can relate to that and so I hope sharing my experience with you all is helpful. And I just want to say don’t be discouraged.

Question 1: [00:00:36] Getting into the first question it’s Why did you choose to go to pharmacy school?

[00:00:43] I am going to be completely honest here and say that pharmacy school was never on my radar to begin with. In high school I did a lot of work in the music community, mainly Warped Tour. That doesn’t exist anymore but basically it was punk rock summer camp. So I worked for a non-profit organization on the tour and I really love the nonprofit work. I loved helping the community and I loved music. And then senior year of high school hit and everyone was applying for college at the time and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I never really planned on going to college in the first place but everyone was applying and I thought I guess I have to do it too, this is what everyone else is doing. And I grew up in the Silicon Valley so everybody was kind of gunning for business or the tech industry and I wanted to be different so I thought okay I’m going to go to school out of state and I’m going to I’m going to do something with science. And so I went to Oregon State University, declared a major in general science and pharmacy just kind of kept popping up because there’s a pharmacy school on the undergraduate campus. I’m on the same undergraduate campus and so I looked more into that and like I said I really enjoyed serving the community and I just remembered how nice and how approachable my local pharmacist was back home. She spoke Vietnamese which was really helpful for my parents and I thought you know I was being true to my values by going the pharmacy route and so I just I decided to pursue pharmacy.

Question 2 [00:02:19] So what has that experience been like?

[00:02:25] I have to say that my pharmacy school experience at least for the first year and a half was extremely rough and kind of discouraging for me because I came in wanting to do direct patient care and then I quickly realized a few months into my first year that that was not the route for me. So I start exploring other options and I’d been in Oregon for around four years by then and I was really homesick. So I stumbled on digital health and I thought okay, a marriage between the tech industry and healthcare like that sounds perfect, I can go back to San Francisco now. So I applied for some internships, obviously didn’t go past the screening stage because I didn’t know what the heck digital health was. I just applied for location and that was actually a blessing in disguise because I thought more about it and I thought okay well the impact that I want to make and the patient population that I want to help, they’re not going to have smartphones, they’re not gonna have Fitbits, they’re not going to have Apple Watches. So am I really going to be doing what I want to do? And I put that in quotes because at this point in time I still have no idea what I wanted to do. And being that person that was just so unsure of my future, it was difficult for me because my classmates seemed like they all knew what their path was and they all had this plan. And I’m sure a lot of people can relate you know because all of my classmates thought okay well I worked as a tech for you know four or five years at X Y Z company and I have a job lined up for me after pharmacy school. I’m just going to be a pharmacist there. And for students who didn’t have that kind of experience or that kind of mentality at my school, our family members really try to push you towards pursuing a residency and going the clinical or the ambulatory care route, mostly because Oregon is at the forefront of moving pharmacy forward and Oregon State University has a lot to do with. I love that. That’s great. Let’s get pharmacies to do more and be better. But like I said, I didn’t want to go that route. So I felt really out of place compared to my classmates and my peers and that was really hard on my mental health.

Question 3 [00:04:37] And that’s a great segway into my primary interests in pharmacy. I went to different conferences and I really just explored as much as I could outside of the traditional, direct patient care space. And luckily halfway through my second year of pharmacy school I identified an interest in medical writing and medical communications. So whether it’s reading clinical trials and summarizing them to my preceptors in journal clubs or grading them for bias or sitting in our drug literature evidence based medicine courses or the summer that I spent in a managed care organization reading clinical trials and meta analyses to help drive formulary management and decision making. I was all for it. I loved it and that was such a sigh of relief for me because I finally, I finally identified what I wanted to do and I can honestly say now that there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing.

Question 4 [00:05:38] Well that being said, what is missing from the traditional pharmacy education?

[00:05:44] I really have to say that outside of classroom experience is definitely missing. I know we all have to do our APPE rotations and IPPE rotations and externships and community outreach and all of that and that’s all mandated by the ACPE in order for your school to get accreditation. That’s not what I’m talking about. Yeah it’s great. Let’s strengthen the clinical skills that we’ve learned in the classroom, applying that out in real life, but I really think pharmacy programs really lack an emphasis on soft skills and I think that’s just because they assume that we’ve had more than enough practice prior to starting a professional degree program. Which I think is a safe assumption to make because let’s say you have an individual, you know Jane Doe. Jane was able to graduate high school at 17 because she skipped a grade in elementary school and then she just happened to take some AP classes in high school and so she got college credit. And so she got her bachelor’s in three years. So let’s say she didn’t take a gap year and started pharmacy school at 20 or 21. I think it’s a safe assumption to make that having lived two decades on this planet you should know how to speak with people, you should know how to vibe, you should know how to read body language, right? But that’s not always the case. And so when you’re doing these required outreaches and these required rotations if you’re not a people person, if you don’t have those soft skills you’re kind of just standing next your poster and you’re waiting for someone to come up to you and ask you about your poster and then you just answer them. You’re not really going to engage in conversation and I don’t really know how pharmacy programs can really control for this. Maybe having more in classroom requirements for soft skills I really don’t know. But I definitely do think that soft skills are lacking in your traditional pharmacy education.

Question 5 [00:07:47] So next question is what has been your approach to plan for after graduation?

[00:07:57] Like I said I go to a lot of conferences and I make a lot of connections with students from other institutions, current fellows, current residents in the field and then just current pharmacists who work in the field. And everyone that I meet, I always try to ask them for advice or ask them what their story is, not really to compare and say okay that’s what I have to do but to really weigh out all of my options and figure out what is best for me. LinkedIn is great as well. I’ll look for people whose job sound interesting and just ask them more about what they do and the level of training necessary to get there. Sometimes I’ll ask them out for coffee, to meet over coffee if they’re in the area and that really has helped me identify you know kind of the right path for me, just as a guide. Again not just as a you have to follow this route.

Question 6 [00:08:53] So that leads in to my career plans. As of now I am in my third year of school and we have two quarters left before we begin our APPE rotations. So I’m really just trying to get through school at this moment and then I’m going to start looking at fellowships or residencies in medical affairs with a managed care and medical communications type of focus. Again I love medical information, clinical trials, writing all of that. I love that. And so that’s really what I want to do.

Question 7 [00:09:35] How do you see your pharmacy career helping you to achieve what you want in your personal life?

[00:09:42] You know I really just feel in my gut that I was put on this earth to kind of shake up healthcare a little bit, right. I am an ENFJ in the Myers-Briggs Personality Type for those of you who don’t know. I am an ENFJ, so I really trust my gut and I trust my intuition intuition on a lot of bigger picture concepts out there such as where’s my life going to take me. But I think I’d say my personal goal really is just to inspire and be the change that I want to see.

Question 8 [00:10:19] What advice would you give people considering pharmacy school? Or advice for incoming students?

[00:10:25] I would say do your research. I don’t mean you have to know exactly what you want to do when you’re applying. We all know that I didn’t. But do your research on the different programs, do your research on the pharmacy landscape, kind of see where it’s at right now and where it’s kind of heading in the future. I didn’t look at other programs I only looked at OSU and that was pretty much because I went to OSU for undergrad. I thought it would be a nightmare to have to move my furniture somewhere else and I just didn’t want to move. And so I went to Oregon State for pharmacy school as well. And I lucked out in the sense that even though I have nontraditional goals and my school really has that clinical emphasis, I was still able to identify opportunities and faculty members who helped drive me to where I need to be and where I want to be and not every school is like that. So really just just do your research because it’s your job to identify that and it’s your job to make these decisions because this is your career. This is your future and no one is going to hold your hand through it, but faculty members, professionals, and just people in your program are really, really receptive to questions and are really going to help catalyze your growth. So even if you just put in that little bit of effort I would say it will get you really far.

Question 9 [00:11:56] And the last question is, where do you see the profession of pharmacy moving in the future?

[00:12:05] I think the future of pharmacy is so much more than community pharmacy or hospital pharmacy or transplant or cardiology or pharmaceutical companies or smartphone apps right. I think it’s more than anything that you can quantitate. I think the pharmacy a future pharmacy is honesty. I think it’s better patient outcomes, better quality of life, and like so many of the most amazing women out there that I’ve met would agree and would hope the future of pharmacy is women really. But in the near future you know in the next ine to five years, maybe in the next couple months, I see pharmacy moving towards autonomous prescribing and really helping alleviate this physician burnout crisis that we’re seeing. And again the future of pharmacy is just its honesty and its being more than just that person behind the counter.

[00:13:05] So I really hope that sharing my experiences was helpful. I just want to reiterate that it’s okay to not know exactly what you want to do. It’s ok to feel lost. I felt lost so much in my pharmacy school career, but just know that if you put in the work you are going to figure out your purpose in life. And I really do believe that, so I would say reach out to people through email, LinkedIn, and go to conferences and just be authentic. And be you. And everything will just fall into place.