First Week of Classes

On Monday my last semester of college classes started. It's crazy to think that this is the last semester of classes and then I start rotations in May for 1 year and will graduate in 2014. When I started college it seemed like the end would never come, but it has really flown by. I know everyone says that about college, but when you decide to go to pharmacy school for 6 years and watch the majority of your friends graduate and start their "real' jobs it seems like you'll be in school forever. 

I still obviously need to pass all of my classes this semester (which I hope I can do) and then do the year of rotations, but the end is near which is both exciting and scary. I really can't wait to find out where my rotations will be and what I will be doing for the next year. I hope that rotations will help me narrow down exactly what I want to do and if a residency if for me. I also hope I will be in a variety of locations so I can decide where I would like to live after school. All of these unknowns are quite scary, but I know that God has a plan for me and I need to let Him work and all I have to do is say yes to him.

Now back to classes.... 

The first week went pretty well. I was really hoping for a snow day on Wednesday since all the other Des Moines metro school had the day off, but had no luck. I had class in the afternoon and the roads weren't too bad by that time so I made it to classes safely. I'll give you all a little run down of my classes this semester so in case I talk about them in later blog posts you'll know what I'm talking about. (this probably won't happen since I don't really talk about my classes on here, but you never know)

Advanced Pharmacy Skills and Applications (APSA) lecture and lab: this is a class where we learn skills that are important for pharmacists such as: counseling, dispensing, vitals, history of present illness, etc. On Monday we talked about cultural competencies and resources you can use to learn more about another culture.

Therapeutics III: this is the third and final class in the series, which teaches us how the medications that treat different conditions and what side effects to expect, dosages, etc. Right now we are learning about oncology, which is an interesting topic, but also very confusing and difficult.

Quality Improvement in Pharmacy Practice: we have been talking about health care and how in the US there really isn't a system and there should be more done to have consistency throughout the health care system. We also discussed about what quality means and if it is different for the consumer than it is for the company.

Clinical Laboratory Medicine: in this class we talk about common lab values that we will see in practice and how to interpret them and what to do to treat abnormalities. I think this class will be really helpful when I go on rotations.

Advanced Psychiatric Pharmacy: this class goes more in depth in psychiatric disorders as well as how to treat them than our therapeutics class. On Friday we talked about stigmas associated with mental disorders and also played a review bingo of common medications prescribed for mental disorders.

I think I'm going to like a lot of my classes and they will all be helpful next year on rotations. It's also really nice to only have 16 credits this semester and I have already noticed how much time I have to get stuff done. This will probably change once things actually get started, but for now I don't feel like I'm drowning in homework, which is good.

Since I don't really have any pictures to add about school. For some reason I don't take pictures in the middle of class, maybe I should start? I'll add a picture of when I went to Minnesota a couple of weeks ago and went ice skating.