Hello fellow scholars. My name is Darin Williams. I am majoring is Biochemistry with meeting the Pre-Pharmacy requirements. I am currently applying to pharmacy schools and hope to attend UNMC next fall. You might have seen me with as mentor polo previously. This summer, I received a position as a pharmacy technician with Bergan-Mercy Inpatient Hospital Pharmacy in Omaha, Nebraska. Since we are an inpatient pharmacy, we only deal with patients that are admitted into the hospital. There are three different shifts that I am allowed to cover. One shift is called “the pit.” That consists of pulling medications that are more critically needed when time is of the essence, such as for the Emergency Room. The second shift that I cover is the Lasting Hope shift. This off site facility is called Lasting Hope because it is a psychiatric unit. We visit this recovery center as a tech once a week, on Mondays, to pull medications. The third shift, which is my which is my most preferred, is the IV shift. This is in the Bergan-Mercy clean room which consists of wearing a full body suit and mixing up IV bags for the patients in the hospital. Everything is not premade or is cheaper if we do it ourselves so there is a lot of general chemistry involved when mixing medications. We have one of the best clean rooms in Omaha that allows us to have longer expiration dates on medications. For example, if we mixed medications in a hood, it would only have around a twelve-hour maximum expiration. But if we reconstituted or created the medication in our clean room, we could move the expiration back to a week or even more depending on type of medication.
What will you do next summer? W.H. Thompson Scholars challenge you to step outside the box and pursue opportunities that challenge you like they did Darin. These are the experiences that will not only build your resume, but your self-confidence.