Panther Profiles are Q&A interviews that highlight Panthers of all stripes -- students, faculty, staff, alum, board members and anyone else in the campus community.
You’ve likely seen Dr. Kara Olstad on campus sometime in the last decade. She arrived as a pre-pharmacy student in her sophomore year in 2014. In the five years she was working toward her doctorate in pharmacy, she was active in campus organizations, including as president of APhA-ASP and secretary of Rho Pi Phi, and as a transfer peer mentor and student ambassador. She returned to ACPHS last year as a PGY2 ambulatory care pharmacy resident. In that role, she has served as a new practitioner mentor to the APhA-ASP campus chapter and has been invited as a panelist for an upcoming ASHP Women in Leadership event.
Dr. Olstad talked about how participating in student organizations, connecting with professors and taking advantage of every opportunity ACPHS offered led her to seek experience in the setting she most enjoys.
You started college at another pharmacy school. Tell us about that decision.
Dr. Kara Olstad: I grew up in Latham. I wanted to go away to school. The school I chose has a similar feel to ACPHS in that it's a smaller college. But it’s in a big city and doesn’t have much of a campus per se. The campus only had housing for first-year students, and then after that you'd find your own housing. For the most part, everyone would go to class and then leave. There wasn't a good common area to meet other people and get involved.
How did you decide on ACPHS?
Everybody I spoke to at ACPHS was so welcoming, and they worked with me to make that transfer happen. When I went to Accepted Students Day, even though I was a transfer student, I got the feeling there was a lot going on.
The academic work at ACPHS is rigorous. How did you juggle it with all your other activities?
It's doable, and in some ways, I'd say helpful. Like when I'd work at Hannaford Pharmacy and then take classes in school – there’d be medications. I could picture them on the shelf at the store and see what strengths they were, so I would know before having learned about it in class what the common doses were.
It was the same with the patient care projects – like, when we’d be out doing blood pressure screenings or talking to people about different medication-related concerns. It supplements what you learn in class.
I also did things like multicultural club’s salsa dancing class. There's a lot of activity on campus, and there's definitely room and time for fun along with studying.
What did you do after graduation?
I did a residency. Traditionally, the PGY1s are hospital-based. I wanted something more focused on outpatient care and chronic disease management. So that led me into a community-based PGY1 residency at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
Then afterwards I worked for a few years in different community pharmacy settings. But I found I wanted to have more time to have conversations with patients and with providers. So that's what led me back to do the ambulatory care PGY2 residency at ACPHS. I thought more training would give me more relevant work experience in that area of practice.
How is the ambulatory care residency different from the community-based residency?
The ambulatory care residency is more advanced and clinic-based. At ACPHS, we rotate through several different clinics, first with primary medicine, and then specialized areas like rheumatology and nephrology. We also have a public health component and spend time at the College Parkside Pharmacy and the Collaboratory. And then we have a lot of teaching time at the College as well.
We do patient education on a lot of the different medication administration devices for rheumatology. There are all these different, unique injectors. There's also a lot of education that goes into diabetes management as well. There's the continuous glucose monitoring, for example. We help patients get set up with that, and also interpret the data with them, so they understand how to use them.
And then, being here at the clinic sites, we have better communication with the doctors, and that's in part because of the relationship that the preceptors have created. We're very well integrated into the team. They come to us with questions and definitely value our inputs.
You’ve experienced ACPHS in different ways – as a transfer pre-pharmacy student and then doctoral student and now as a resident. Do you have any advice for incoming students?
They should put themselves out there. The faculty and staff are very supportive.
If there's something that you're interested in, go ahead and ask. Ask the professor what they do at their practice site or go to a patient care event with a student organization.
What I would learn outside of just going to class was kind of surprising. And that all came about from getting involved with patient care projects or asking questions and staying curious.