Professional Laboraties

Facilitation of Professional Program Laboratories at Purdue University College of Pharmacy | 53 hours

During my time assisting the Purdue University College of Pharmacy with the Professional Program Labs, I have had a variety of experiences.

I co-coordinated the PHRM 84000: Diabetes Point of Care laboratory with another resident. This required updating the materials for the laboratory from the previous year, arranging volunteers, training volunteers, ensuring all required equipment for the laboratory was available and accessible, teaching the pre-laboratory micro-lecture, teaching one of the stations, and ensuring all volunteers were actively participating to ensure a positive student experience.

I have served as a facilitator, working with students to stimulate conversations and engage in activities provided during this period. For some laboratories, facilitation also required performing as a standardized patient to help students progress in their investigative skills. One example of this is the PHRM 82000: Head, ears, eyes, nose, and throat (HEENT) laboratory.

On numerous occasions I have performed as an evaluator for the students, including for their end of semester, high stakes, performance based assessments. These experiences involve providing verbal and written formative feedback to the students on their practically applied skills.

Diabetes Point of Care Lab Reflection

Throughout my residency year, I have been experiencing a lot of academic “firsts”. The diabetes point of care lab was the first lab I ever helped run. The Mathes resident and I worked together to coordinate and run the lab: orienting volunteers, teaching the prelab portion, and performing POC A1C testing in front of the class. Working with Alyssa to coordinate this lab was overwhelming. As a lot of the required activities for this were better left with one singular point of contact, Alyssa and Nikki (our RPD) ran this through Alyssa’s email account. I was still involved in the organization and updating of the materials prior to the start of the lab and cc’d on all emails about the lab. Alyssa and I had phone meetings where we discussed the lab and the steps we were taking to make it work.

When actually getting to the lab, the best experience and the worst experience, was that everything did not go according to plan. While this was difficult for two residents who had never done this before to figure out, we were able to band together and figure out how to solve our problems. This included figuring out how to obtain materials we were missing and how to handle a sudden lack of volunteers for the second half of the week. We were able to reorganize and reorient the volunteers to new places where we needed to have extra eyes.

At the beginning of the week, teaching the lab was fun and exciting. I was still working out how to time everything perfectly in order to have enough time for each activity and have a short Q&A at the end of each session. While this generally worked, depending on the students in each group, things had to be reassessed and reworked on the fly. This was a great learning experience in tailoring information and education to each individual group and making sure all groups left with a positive learning experience. By the end of the week, I noticed, that teaching the same material three times a day for five days was quite tiring. While I still enjoyed the setting and the atmosphere, it definitely took a toll. It may have been more beneficial to keep Alyssa and me fresh on our topics by switching us around the stations. However, for continuity of education, keeping us in the same stations every day was ideal.