Member of the Month: Patrick Bell

Congratulations to Patrick Bell for winning member of the month!  To celebrate, we wanted to get to know Patrick better and share a little bit about him.  If you’d like to nominate someone for member of the month for recognition in their efforts to advocate for CPNP topics, or for advocating for pharmacy in general, visit this link here: http://org.osu.edu/cpnposu/contact/

Q1: What activities/organizations are you involved with in the College of Pharmacy?

 In addition to CPNP, I am also involved with AMCP and the Phi Delta Chi fraternity.

 

Q2: How did you get here? Describe your path. When did you know you wanted to do pharmacy?

I’ve known since I was young that I wanted to be involved in science but wasn’t sure exactly what I would want to do. I enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia to pursue a degree in biology. In my sophomore year I met my good friend Alex who really got me thinking about the possibility of working as a pharmacist and how he really liked the work he was doing as an intern at a hospital in his home town. After a year of thinking, I decided that I wanted to go into pharmacy and learn more about what options are available for people with a PharmD.

After graduation I wanted to take some time off from school before another 4 years so I worked as a research specialist in translational sleep medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in the lab of Dr. Sigrid Veasey whom I had been doing part time lab tech work with throughout my senior year. While there, I got to work on many wet-lab projects but was most interested in animal studies, particularly when we got to test experimental drugs and their effects in preventing neurodegeneration and tau accumulation in sleep deprivation models. After my experience in Dr. Veasey’s lab, I knew I wanted to be the expert in drugs, how they are used and the principals behind their actions, especially those that concern the brain.

 

Q3: What would you like to do in pharmacy? What is your dream job in pharmacy practice? 

I am still very new to the pharmacy practice, especially as a P1, so it is hard to say exactly where I want to be. In a general sense, I want to be involved with newer drugs coming down the pipeline and areas of pharmacy with rapid development. Investigational Drug Services is an area of pharmacy I’ve recently learned about that has piqued my interests recently. I am also interested in the use of technology to both accelerate pharmaceutical developments and enhance patient adherence. It would also be interesting to be a full research oriented pharmacist in my personal interest of sleep pharmaceuticals. But again, there is still so much for me to learn and experience, I don’t want to begin narrowing my possible carrier paths.

 

Q4: In what ways do you feel like you’ve most grown during your time in the College of Pharmacy?

The easy answer is of course study skills and time management. Pharmacy school has pushed me to refine how I study and use my time; fortunately there plenty of exams to get quick feedback on what works and what doesn’t work for you. But I think my biggest growth has been in developing my professionalism. I am generally a pretty relaxed and informal person so I sometimes find it hard to “turn it on” so to speak. While I haven’t had too many opportunities to practice my new skills, I can already see the mental shift in myself of knowing what to say and when to say it. While I know I can be polite, there is something about feeling prepared in professional situations that I’ve only recently learned how to accomplish.

 

Q5: What has been the most difficult thing for you to accomplish during Pharmacy school so far?

The most difficult thing so far, for me, was learning the top 100 prescription drugs and their classes. I have had no experience prior to pharmacy school with these drugs so getting myself through learning the brand and generic names on top of everything else for class was a big challenge for sure. In retrospect I think I learned a lot because of the difficulty of this personal challenge. I feel a lot better about learning the top 200 at the moment than how I felt prior to the top 100!

 

Q6: If you had to give one piece of advice to your fellow classmates, what would that be?

Don’t stress too much and get a good amount of sleep every night. Be okay with not getting everything perfectly and learn to accept failure gracefully.

 

Thanks again, Patrick, for being an advocate for CPNP!