Observation 7

Graduate Professor Interview

For my seventh observation, I thought it would be interesting to talk to a Professor as opposed to an actual Pharmacist. My room mate's aunt is a Pharmacology Professor. Dr. Thomas teaches at St. Johns University in Jamaica, New York. I interviewed her over the phone and talked to her about what I can expect to study when I get to graduate school.

Dr. Thomas explained that she teaches a class of about 20 students at a time. Because she teaches at a private school, similar to Nova, there are small class sizes. Her course covers Systems Pharmacology or organ-related Pharmacology. Some of the topics from her syllabus include drug disposition, pharmacokinetics, autonomic pharmacology, central nervous system pharmacology, the pharmacology of inflation, allergy and platelet function, cardiovascular, endocrine, renal and gastric pharmacology.

Undergraduate education is much different from Graduate level education courses. In graduate school, students are required to complete papers, practicals, and will have large-scale exams that they must pass in order to succeed in a class. They do not have the busy work or regular quizzes or test they may have seen in their undergraduate classes. Additionally, Dr. Thomas explained that undergraduate education, especially in Pre-Pharmacy majors, require a lot of difficult Chemistry courses that act as a sort of "weeding-out" process. Graduate school is more of a hands-on education where training to be an actual Pharmacist occurs. However, many students struggle through the undergraduate courses and change majors before they ever make it to graduate school.

Interviewing Dr. Thomas was possibly my most helpful observation so far. The other observations I have conducted have given me a lot of valuable information. However, Dr. Thomas gave me a new perspective on my future graduate education. I knew that I had numerous chemistry courses in my future. However, now that I know that they are supposed to be hard to weed out the students who can't "hack" the hard work, it gives me more incentive to stick it out and succeed.