Five really useful things to learn?

[meangrape]

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I'm starting my two year trek through prereqs next Monday. I'm sure that there will be a lot of things that will be useful. I'm also sure that there will be a lot of things I can forget right after the test.

What are five (or two) (or six) fundamental subjects that I should try to learn as thoroughly as possible? I'm not talking about "learning to pass" or "learning to get into pharm school"; I'm talking about five things that will really help me as a pharmacy student and/or a practicing pharmacist.

They don't necessarily have to be things covered in the standard set of prereqs either.

For instance, it seems to me that renal physiology is something that I should probably learn as much as possible about. (I could be wrong, mind you).

Conversely, what are some things that might seem important to me over the next two years that probably won't be that important?

I guess I'm asking what are five things that you wish you really had a good grip on before starting pharmacy school -- and what are five things that you later wished you hadn't spent so much time learning?

 

[DownonthePharm]

Learn these five things:

How to communicate effectively without talking down to a person.
How to diffuse a difficult person.
How to time manage.
How to motivate and self-motivate.
How to not be frustrated by your failures.

Most important classes to know:

Physiology
General Bio
College Algebra/Calculus
Chemistry
Organic Chem

I havent been to pharmacy school, but I can imagine you can forget:

Government
History
A lot of General Zoology (even though there is some on the PCAT)

 

[crossjb]

"How to diffuse a difficult person."

I strongly recommend working at a retail pharmacy. You'll get invaluable experience with this one. 😀

 

[meangrape]

"How to diffuse a difficult person."

I strongly recommend working at a retail pharmacy. You'll get invaluable experience with this one. 😀

Well, my three years as the front-end manager of a grocery store has pretty much maxed me out in this field.

 

[OSURxgirl]

If you are talking about topics within courses, I would say

stereochemistry
organic functional groups (and their Pka's)
acid/base chemistry (weak acids/bases, hendreson-hasselbach, ionization)
basic anatomy (especially of the brain and heart)

These are some topics that came up in first year that I wish I had had a better background on. Every school and every person is different though.

 

[meangrape]

Thanks! That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Something concrete that I can look at and say, "Yup, that's something I can make sure to pay extra attention to in class."

The "be nice to people / learn how to study" suggestions are nice but pointless. I mean, nobody is going to suggest, "Well, you should really work on being intolerant and rude. While you're at it, I recommend that you focus on not studying and blowing off tests."

Other than the obvious (american history, etc) is there anything that you think might come across as important that probably isn't that important?

 

[RLK]

"How to diffuse a difficult person."

I strongly recommend working at a retail pharmacy. You'll get invaluable experience with this one. 😀

Fast food is worse. Get a cash register job at McDonalds. You may never want to deal with the public again though if you do.

 

[b*rizzle]

Fast food is worse. Get a cash register job at McDonalds. You may never want to deal with the public again though if you do.

I've worked both food and retail. They're not much better in either. People are difficult/nasty/pushy/impatient everywhere because we let them be that way. We give them drive-thrus. We give them $25 gift cards when they complain. When they're rude and nasty in line about the package of markers that rings up for 3.75 but dammit is supposed to be 2.50 (even though they were only sale items LAST week), we give it to them because we just want to make the problem go away (and we don't want them to shop somewhere else).

Customers are used to having it their way. So naturally, if they think that clearly they could put pills in a bottle faster, or obviously it does not take that much time to put a hamburger together, then they will not hesitate to be rude about it, because they've been taught that's the best way to remedy the situation.

And isn't it?

I know from experience when someone like that comes in the pharmacy, standing there hovering over you, there's usually more hustle on the part of the pharmacists to hurry up and check the Rx so they can just get them out.

 

[38ctk]

H.E.A.T for problems

H = Hear out your patient
E = empathesize with your patient
A = apologize to your patient
T= take action to solve the problem