Sai Muttavarapu
Senior Project Reflection
For my senior project, I researched on medications. I researched the variety
of medications that are available to us, their role, the different forms of medications,
and how to be safe with them. I typed all the information I found.
The health careers pathway was my interest for years. I volunteered at
Tuality Healthcare in Hillsboro during the summer of 2014, where I worked at the
birth center information desk every Saturday from morning to afternoon. My job
was to allow visitors in and keep track of them. Since I wanted to head towards the
health careers pathway, I wanted to work in a hospital with real patients, which is
how I decided to volunteer at the Tuality Healthcare. It might not have been an
experience that related directly to my career goals, but I was able to work in a
hospital environment and with real patients, which helped me in deciding my future
plans. By doing this, I was able to be close with patients and see their content in
looking at their newborn child. It felt like an astounding opportunity to be able to
share the parents’ content with everybody.
My interest in pharmacy, which works with effects of medicines on people
started then as well. Pharmacy is based on a lot of chemistry and the chemical
compounds of the medicines. I wanted to make more families happy like the families
I saw in my experience at Tuality Healthcare. I wanted to contribute my future job to
those families by helping create new medicines that will cure diseases and prevent
the families from losing their loved ones.
I also shadowed a pharmacist at Walgreens for the whole day on a Saturday.
By shadowing, I was able to know a daily schedule of a pharmacist and their job and
responsibility in a pharmacy. A lot of the patients that came in that day were for
refills of prescriptions. The patients could either call the pharmacy or walk in. When
the prescription information was received, it was put into a computer to generate a
label of the drug name, patient name, directions, amount, warnings, etc. A technician
would check the label, locate the drug on a shelf with alphabetically ordered drugs,
and dispense the amount of the drug needed into the container. Then, everything
would be left there for the pharmacist to take a look at one last time. After that, the
drug would be sent out. This process is called a three-check system which includes
inputting the information into the computer, having a technician prepare the
container, and then having a pharmacist double check everything. The pharmacist
also said that every seven days, he is required to submit a report of how many
substances had been dispensed. These reports help physicians, health care
professionals, and law enforcement to help make sure no illegal transactions are
happening. The pharmacist said that it was very important to maintain an accurate
inventory of medications in order for the pharmacy to operate properly and to
ensure profit maximization. If an inventory of a drug was running low, they would
create an order for that drug.
I took this project as an opportunity to do research on my own and increase
my exposure to my career goal. Doing this project gave me a major jump-start to my
future. I was able to build a platform of the basic information needed to know in the
field.
I chose this project because my only interest has been the medical field, and
being a pharmacist requires the knowledge of the medicines that they prescribe to
patients. Acquiring the knowledge of different prescribed medicines benefited me
and exposed me to what I will be learning in my near future. Now, college will not
seem hard to me because I already have some of the knowledge needed with me.
By doing this project I realized that pharmacy is not hard. It is in fact simple
and basic. I learnt that medicines have families as well, and the members in the
same family have the same function. When we think of medicines, we usually think
of curing the problem, but not all medicines cure. Some just clear the symptoms or
stop the pain. There are so many types of medicines that have different functions. I
also learnt about how important the FDA is. Before I started this project, I didn’t
know what it was.
A lot of the commonly prescribed drugs have similar functions and treat
similar illnesses. Medications that treat depression have the same functions but
differ in which neurotransmitter they affect. Also, a lot of the medicines’ common
side effect is nausea and vomiting.
