alex's pharmacy jouRxney

Hello friends! Even though it has only been a week, it has felt like forever. As I am reaching the halfway mark of my first rotation block, the fact that I am a P4 student is finally hitting me. Watching friends in the class above in their graduation gowns was the boost of energy I needed to get to the finish line. I have already started planning locations and fun poses for my graduation photos. Stay tuned!

I have been able to work a lot for my two jobs this past weekend, and I had an opportunity at one to present to upper leadership for the first time. That was an incredibly rewarding experience since I got the chance to show off the work I had been doing in the background.

Outside of work, I have gotten my creative spark back that I have been missing to finish preparing my publications I am working on. I now have an official outline for two papers, a deadline for one, and a journal for the other. In all this craziness, I discovered a call for papers that I am incredibly passionate about. I am in the process of finding a mentor to be my co-author for that paper. This has been a difficult process since the summer is when many professors are not available, so I will update here once I have found someone.

This weekend, I will be getting to attend the Indy 500, which was so fun last time I attended. Even though I am so close to Indy, it has been so long since I have gone into town. I am excited to see friends and Eric’s family.

In response to last week’s goals, I am sad to report that I did not accomplish all of them. I am planning to send off the gratitude letters tomorrow, so I am behind on that. Additionally, my projects for my rotation have been individual this week, so I haven’t gotten to meet more people like I had hoped last week. I am 50% through the book I started reading last week. I keep falling asleep in bed while reading. It has been hard for me to justify doing anything that isn’t for my jobs, research, or rotation. I need to break the blockade in my mind that is convincing me that activities in my free time are not valuable compared to work. Muffin also did not get to go on a hike yet because it has been raining most of the week. I am still planning to take her either tonight or this weekend since she is long overdue for an adventure. The CoRec at Purdue was closed this week, so even I couldn’t get my needed exercise. I have been a bit too lazy. Don’t ever give me an excuse to not workout lol!

In response to how badly I failed to meet my goals this week, I have decided to roll over those goals to next week and add one single new one: analyze the data from my survey project. I have been teaching myself statistics over the past few weeks on Stata and SAS so that I can perform basic data analysis on my own. It has been surprisingly fun, especially now that I have a coding background in Python and R. This goal needs to be accomplished anyway, but I am excited to see how my survey’s results turned out so I wanted to share that goal here.

I need to give a big shoutout to my brother, who finished his final demos for culinary school this week! It was also his 21st birthday this week, so if you know him, wish him a happy birthday. He is now off to his externship, which is a similar situation to my rotations. He will graduate in the early fall, and I could not be prouder. He has worked his tail off to gain all these skills so quickly, and I am so sad I could not be there in person to taste the food at his final demo. He is going to be famous one day, mark my words! Hopefully, he won’t forget about his boring pharmacist brother.

This week I also got a new pair of glasses, which has an updated prescription. Unfortunately, my eyes keep getting worse, but thankfully, this new pair is giving me far fewer headaches. I went down a rabbit hole this week of the science behind face shapes and frames when deciding which would be most flattering. I was a bit too close to the LooksMaxxing community, so my advice is to avoid that side of the internet.

After a few months of forgetting to do so, I finally made a monthly Spotify playlist. Recently, I have been into metal and grunge so my normal pop/R&B playlist is sprinkled with some fun darker tracks. I listen to darker music in the summer and brighter/softer music in the winter, which is probably the opposite of most other people. Loud music is best played on long car rides in the sun!

I am wishing you all a wonderful week and hoping that you enjoy the summer weather by taking a hike, even if you live in flat Indiana lol!

Here is your Muffin picture of the week: