 Hey, my name is Kami Cleveland. I'm an Alabama Forest State Ambassador and I'm here with Mrs. Virginia Davis who is a pharmacist Who is also my great aunt and I'm going to be asking her some questions. So how did you get into pharmacy? When he story I wanted to drop out of high school, but I had to tell my mother what I was going to go to the pharmacy school I did drop out of high school after the 11th grade because I found a college that would let me go ahead and start as a full-time student So although I have a pharmacy degree. I have no high school diploma Okay, cool. So what was your major in college? It was always pharmacy When I went through pharmacy school, you did two years of pre-pharmacy in three years of pharmacy school It's usually three years of pre-pharmacy and then you get into pharmacy school Some people are doing an actual weird degree going to pharmacy school because it's gotten hard to get into pharmacy school Okay, thank you. So how long have you been a pharmacist? Thinking about that just today I have been behind a pharmacy counter for 45 years now It's impressive. So can you tell me what a day as a pharmacist is like? Okay, most of the time you're going to work a shift And some shifts might be a nine, ten, twelve hour day Sometimes if you're working for a chain, you'll have a short day and a long day So it depends on how it's set up You go in and you usually start off with whatever prescriptions people walked in with You get those filled and then you start looking for the route that you can call in And you do the refill work in between people walking in Most pharmacies, especially if you're at a chain pharmacy You've got a full day of picking up the next prescription filling it Get that done The pharmacy prescription volume has increased considerably because we have so many drugs to treat so many different elements Wow, that's cool So what do you think is the best thing about your job? What I think is the best thing about being female in pharmacy Is it has been easy over the course of my career to work full time Or part time and at one point I even stopped for about two years When I wanted to get back into it. It was very easy to find a job and go right back in So for a lot of women It's a good job in that when you have babies or small children You can slow down and work part time And when the kids get over it's easy to get back into full time That makes sense, yeah So what are some skills that you think anyone needs to have going into pharmacy? Okay Do you have to have chemistry in math skills? There's a lot of chemistry that you learned going through pharmacy school Um Some of the math is just common sense if you're going to take a pill times a day for seven days You have to know that's 21 pills you have to dispense Some things like eye drops get real tricky and you have to be very very Careful and exacting with your math To be able to do that eye drop prescription Has to be precise one thing about pharmacy is it's either a hundred percent right Or it's wrong. You should know you can give buy with cheating on Well, this is close. We'll let it be. I only have 18 pills ever supposed to get 21 You've got to be precise as a pharmacist Precision that makes sense So how do you see pharmacy evolving in the future? Well, it's changed already a good bit Pharmacy is unique in the healthcare professions Because it's a business as well as a science There's an aspect of art to it being Good if if you're compounding that's an art really as much as it is a science um Pharmacy like I said the volume has picked up and needed a lot more pharmacists So they've added some pharmacy schools. It's actually gotten easier to get into pharmacy now But pharmacy has changed just like doctors now can be a hospitalist instead of an office practice There are clinical pharmacists now that are hired by the hospitals That watch out for what's being prescribed in the hospital Sometimes they might go around and suggest this is the best drug to give this patient Whereas in the past it was always the doctor decided what to give The pharmacist might make a suggestion, but we didn't actually prescribe I think you're going to see more of that happening that the doctor will make the diagnosis and the pharmacist can say This is what's going on and this is the drug that's needed But that's pretty much only going to happen in a hospital or a clinic You still have a part of pharmacy that's called community pharmacy Which is the mom and pots, which is your chain pharmacist that literally just take the piece of paper from the doctor and build the prescription That's me. Thank you. So what advice would you give youth wanting to pursue a career in pharmacy? Well, the first thing I usually tell them When they get out of high school and they start to college Take freshman chemistry chemistry 101 If you can't span chemistry, you're not going to be happy going through pharmacy school But that's usually my first You know prerequisites go do that I would also suggest once you get to be 19 Go get a job in a pharmacy in Alabama They are now requiring some training to be a pharmacy tech You get the job first and then you spend six months doing this training and take a test at the end to show that you've learned what they're supposed to learn and Registered tech Now there's there's also being a certified tech And if you want to go to pharmacy school, I don't know that I worry about being certified If you're happy just being a tech and you don't want to go to pharmacy school I would strongly advise you to get to be a certified tech Because you can take on more responsibility And you get paid better Okay, that's really cool. Thank you So those are all my questions I have. Thank you for your time Thank you uh For kids that are thinking that they'd like to go into pharmacy You are not allowed to go behind the pharmacy counter without being Registered with the state board But I would go hang out and one and watch what the pharmacist does see that's something you want to do It would be very hard to get into a hospital setting But just go observe it's unique in that we have wonderful patient interaction For years and years and years pharmacists were considered to be the most trusted profession We deal directly with the patients. We get to have a lot of one-on-one advice giving That some of the other professions just really don't get like pharmacy does So if you like people community pharmacy might Thank you. Thank you. That sounds like a really cool job