Professional Advice

I’ll give you some background on this question I’m posing. I am teaching a course this semester in career coaching at a state university, my students are in their first year of pharmacy school. I am meeting with my students via zoom, and my role is to listen to their career goals, and offer support and advice to help them move forward in achieving their desired goal. 

When I was on a call last week, one of my students asked me for the best advice that I’ve ever been given. For me that advice was given to me and my entire pharmacy class during the last week of school. We were doing a NPLEX review and I remember the professor said at the end of the week “If you don’t know something, look it up”. He continued and said that we had been given a quality education, but pharmacy is a fluid practice and there would constantly be new drug/research/guidelines coming out and to practice at the top of our profession we must stay current.

Over the course of my profession I have found this to be completely true. I’ve seen many prescriptions for new medications show up at my pharmacy, and I had no idea what they were for. In those cases the first thing I do is look it up and do some research. It’s never a bad answer to say “I need to look into that, can I get back to you?” I’m a strong believer that education is power.

Have you ever been given advice and it just really stuck with you?