Pathways in Pharmacy is an ongoing series where we’ll learn about different career journeys that began with a pharmacy degree. This month, Curt Fowkes tells us about his journey from the University of Alberta, to UBC, through to a hospital residency and ICU work with Northern Health, before finding his path back into community pharmacy.

JK: Why did you choose pharmacy as a profession?

CF: Well, we’re thinking back a while ago! I grew up in Quesnel, just south of Prince George. I knew a pharmacist when I was in high school there and spent some time job shadowing with him. He was very passionate about what he did and his mentorship is what initially got me interested. He worked with another pharmacist who had completed a hospital pharmacy residency. He also had experiences to share that showed me there was a lot more to offer from the degree than I had realized.

Quesnel is a pretty small community where everybody knows everybody, and I saw the impact that these pharmacists were having on the lives of people that I knew. I also felt that becoming a pharmacist would provide job security for my own future.

JK: And how did you come to UBC Pharm Sci then?

CF: After high school I went to the University of Alberta, intent on attending their school of pharmacy. But after a couple of years away from home, I wanted to move back to BC. My sister was already in the pharmacy program at UBC, my brother had just finished school at UBC and was still living in Vancouver, and we had spent a lot of time at UBC growing up as my parents were both UBC graduates.

JK: What was the best thing about UBC for you? 

CF: Well as my parents had been to UBC, we had made lots of trips there while I was growing up, so I was familiar with the campus. My parents were down in Vancouver a lot visiting, so I had lots of family around. It didn’t hurt that Whistler is nearby with great skiing!

JK: Did you move to Prince George right after graduation?

CF: Yup. I had applied for the hospital pharmacy residency program about halfway through my fourth year. Before the residency results came back I started thinking that perhaps the hospital pharmacy wasn’t for me – but after interviewing with each of the health authorities for a spot in their residency program I decided that it was probably a case of now or never for the extra experience. My sister was accepted into the UBC PharmD program and I thought that down the road that might be something I was interested in as well.

I decided to go with the residency program through Northern Health mainly because it was based out of Prince George and had close proximity to my hometown… and many ski hills! I grew up in this area so it was an easy transition back.

JK: So what happened after your residency?

CF: Afterwards, I continued to work for Northern Health. At the time, they presented me with an excellent opportunity to work as a full time clinical pharmacist in their ICU. I stayed in that role for a few years, but the job gradually expanded into other areas and I began to miss a lot of the interaction I’d previously had with patients in the community.

Throughout my residency, and after, I had worked for a couple of pharmacists who owned two independent pharmacies in town. Their pharmacies had a huge range of variations to the services they provided, and had been locally owned in the community for forty years. I had always appreciated their practice, and how close they were with all of their patients. This is largely what led me to leave the hospital and work with them full time.

I worked hard for them for three or four years, allowing myself to be mentored in the business aspects of pharmacy, and the value of patient-pharmacist interactions. I did my best to build a clinical practice for myself in their stores, and gradually my role grew.

This summer a great opportunity came up where another local independent pharmacy owner was retiring, and I partnered with these new mentors of mine to purchase his pharmacy as an equal shareholder.

JK: That’s great! It sounds like a big part of the appeal of being a pharmacist is being a part of the community and getting to know people. Do you feel that’s how things have turned out for you?

CF: Yes, I think a huge part of our job as pharmacists is getting to know people. There is so much focus in school on theory and how to treat conditions, and manage them best for people, but you can’t do that as effectively without having a good relationship with the patient. It’s essential for people to receive good care, and have somebody that they can go to and talk to. I’m so glad I did the hospital residency because I definitely find that I am still incorporating clinical functions that I learned in my residency into my everyday practice. I also got to know a lot of physicians in town here and have built good relationships with them. This really helps me to advocate on behalf of my patients and make a difference for them.

JK: If you could go back to your pharmacy school self, what advice would you give to him?

CF: Keep your eyes open! You never know what kind of opportunities are going to come along your way, how life is going to change, or what you might come across. I think it’s good to gain any experience that you can. Keep your eyes open, look for opportunities to expand your knowledge, and think outside the box.

Any questions for Curt? Leave them in the comments or on Facebook.

Read Pathways in Pharmacy #1 with Mark Kunzli.

Learn more about our programs here.

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Pathways in Pharmacy is a new monthly series where we’ll learn about different career journeys that began with a pharmacy degree. This month, Mark Kunzli tells us about his journey to, through, from, and ultimately back to UBC Pharm Sci.

Mark (top left) with his family, June 2015. His late father Ken, brothers Matthew and Michael, sisters Kristi and Karli, and his nieces Hazel, Mia, and Rihlynn.

JK: Why did you decide to study pharmacy?

MK: While I’d like to say that it’s because I’ve had a passion for counting by fives and getting yelled at for prescriptions not being covered since I was a child, my path to (and then through) pharmacy was not linear.

After high school, I knew I wanted to pursue post-secondary education but had no idea what to study. I started out taking first-year Arts courses, and, after actually getting 0% on a paper in Sociology, decided that I was better suited to the more black and white world of science. So the following year, I took all first-year Sciences courses – but unfortunately brought my last-minute cramming/writing work ethic with me and my average took a hit.

I went into second-year science without any real direction, and a week into school I ran into a friend from the previous year who wasn’t in any of my classes. I asked what he was studying and he said he was re-taking all his first-year science courses to bring up his average to apply for the BSc(Pharm) program. That was the first time I’d thought of studying pharmacy. My best friend Luke LePage’s dad was a pharmacist, so I had a chat with him to find out more about what I could expect. I was initially attracted by the prospect of a stable job with a good income but the more I learned about pharmacy the more the profession appealed to me. Cliché I know, but I’ve always enjoyed helping people and am a social person, so the opportunity to interact with and build relationships with patients interested me.

Deciding that the third time would be the charm, I re-took all my first-year science courses in order to increase my average and apply for the BSc(Pharm) program. It worked!

JK: Tell us about your first foray into working as a pharmacist.

MK: After graduation I moved to the thriving metropolis of Campbell River, where I worked at Willow Point Peoples Drug Mart for Victor Choo. It was the middle of golf season, and Victor was an avid golfer. After showing me the ropes for a few weeks, he hit the links and I was left to find out what I was made of as a pharmacist. Outside of my clerkships, I hadn’t worked in a pharmacy before and freely admit that I was terrified and completely overwhelmed for those first couple of months. But when faced with the choice to sink or swim, I quickly decided that I’d leave the sinking (of putts) to Victor, and I learned to swim.

There were a few early lessons – like the time I made my first typo on a prescription, didn’t know how to correct it, and thought I’d forever be branded as illiterate by anyone looking at the patient’s PharmaNet profile. I also recall learning the very valuable lesson that some people have surnames that can also be used as first names and that doctors will occasionally write a patient’s last name first without punctuation in-between (are commas that hard to write?!). Thankfully the medical office assistant that received my frantic phone call was gentle when she told me that I was an idiot and I needed to switch the names around.

After a couple of months of almost daily phone calls to other pharmacists for help and getting to know everybody at tech support on a first-name basis, I’d found my way and was promoted to Pharmacy Manager.

JK: What are some key takeaways from this role?

MK: I worked at Willow Point Peoples Drug Mart for almost two years and consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had that opportunity. I’ve always liked the adage “why work hard when you can work smart?” and took a keen interest in streamlining pharmacy operations. I learned the pharmacy dispensing software inside-and-out, mainly through trial and error, but always made sure I understood why things worked the way they did. This gave me much greater insight into how to automate processes, and more importantly allowed me to investigate and help patients when they asked why certain things were covered when others weren’t.

I learned about the impact that drug coverage (or the lack thereof) has on compliance. I focused on finding win-win’s for the patient and the pharmacy, and found that minimizing out-of-cost expense for patients not only increased compliance, but increased loyalty beyond a transactional relationship. In doing so, I was able to earn the respect of both my patients and my physician colleagues while also seeing the business side of the pharmacy do quite well.

While those first few months saw many words (unsuitable for this blog) muttered under my breath, I had an awesome group of co-workers to support me and benefited tremendously from the autonomy I was given by Victor. With the benefit of experience, I realize now that the only words I should have been muttering were ‘thank you.’ I believe that a good working environment is half who you work with, and half what you make of it. I’ve always been very fortunate to work with great people.

JK: You have an Executive MBA in Healthcare Management. Why did you pursue this program and how has it complemented your pharmacy degree?

Executive MBA graduation, November 2011. Mark with his parents Ken and Kathy.

MK: Well, as I mentioned, after starting out as a pharmacist I found myself drawn to the operational and financial aspects of the profession. I left my first job in Campbell River to work as a relief pharmacist; starting a company and contracting myself as a locum around the province. I wanted the freedom to pick and choose when and where I worked, as well as the opportunity to learn how different pharmacies are run.

In late 2009 I ran into my former prof, Dr. Wayne Riggs, at an alumni event and inquired about opportunities to get involved with the Faculty again. He suggested I sit down with Dr. Ron Reid to discuss his efforts in bringing pharmacogenomics into pharmacy practice. I met Ron at Timmies and quickly saw the potential of this idea. While my front-line experience working as a pharmacist was enough to understand how genomics could be implemented in the pharmacy environment, I wanted to expand my knowledge to figure out how we could make it happen.

My dad had always suggested I consider studying for an MBA to complement my pharmacy degree. I ran the idea of the Executive MBA in Healthcare Management program by Ron and Wayne, who both encouraged me to go for it. What appealed to me about the program was the fact that it would allow me to continue to work as a pharmacist while studying, and also that I would be studying alongside, and learning from, people from other healthcare disciplines. As I went through the program I found that my view of the world expanded from very pharmacy-centric; to gaining an appreciation of where pharmacy fits into the healthcare system; to understanding how healthcare fits into the economy and society as a whole.

I was able to choose my own topics for MBA assignments. I focused on pharmacogenomics for most of my assignments, working very closely with Ron and Wayne on different aspects of how to bring pharmacogenomics into pharmacy practice. This work helped develop the foundation for my current role, where I work with Drs. Corey Nislow and Ron Reid on projects implementing pharmacist-led pharmacogenomics.

JK: What made you decide to take a different path from community pharmacy practice?

MK: I’m still a community pharmacist at heart! While I’m full-time in my position here at the Faculty, I do take shifts to keep myself up-to-date and able to appreciate what my colleagues are experiencing in the field. In terms of what led me here, it was a series of decisions to pursue what interested me most in pharmacy practice. Don’t get me wrong, I often miss interacting and building relationships with patients, but I’m competitive by nature and thrive on a challenge. In practice, this led to finding ways to optimize processes and seek out ways to continuously improve. This took me from the dispensary in Campbell River, to pharmacies throughout the province, and then into that conversation at Timmies with Ron. It was during that discussion (over our delicious and very reasonably-priced coffee) that I realized that my profession has a unique opportunity to make people healthier through pharmacogenomics. I wanted to contribute in any way I could. My need for a new challenge and continuing desire to give back to the profession led me to take a different path from community pharmacy practice but I wouldn’t be where I am today without Ron’s influence, Dr. Corey Nislow giving me an opportunity to actually do this, and the support of them and many others along the way.

JK: If you could go back and give some strongly worded advice to your pharmacy-school self, what would you tell him?

MK: Geez, my pharmacy-school self probably wouldn’t believe that my present-day self is even real!

Off the top, there’s my go-to piece of advice from Michael Scott, “Don’t be an idiot” (https://youtu.be/aVlG9W1eUio). There are numerous times when I would have benefited from hearing that in pharmacy school.

I think more than anything I’d encourage pharmacy student-me to always learn from failure. My road through school and life definitely could have been easier if I’d learned some lessons sooner, but my failures taught me important lessons and also made me appreciate my successes that much more. Case in point, I failed Ron’s class in pharmacy school (along with 15 of my classmates that year, for the record), and ended up leaving my summer job two weeks early to come to Vancouver and study to make sure I passed the supplemental. Ron walked by me one day in IRC and said “about time you did some studying.” He was right. And now, the topic of that same course that I didn’t understand the value of as a student – pharmacogenomics – is a huge part of my career and hopefully one day soon, my profession. And that same prof is one of my closest friends and most valued colleagues.

Mark and Ron, Halloween 2014. You know you’ve been working with someone for too long when…

At the end of the day – do your best, but even when you fail you can learn a hell of a lot from it. Provided you’re not an idiot, of course!

Any questions for Mark? Leave them in the comments or on Facebook.

Mark Kunzli is Project Manager & Associate Director, UBC Sequencing Centre.

Learn more about our programs here.

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Meet our new Recruitment & Admissions Officer, Carol Kuang. Carol joined us at UBC Pharm Sci in August and her goal is to help make applying for the Entry-to-Practice PharmD program as simple and transparent as possible. We sat down with Carol for a chat…

Carol Kuang

Tell us about yourself! What did you do before starting at UBC Pharm Sci this summer?
I moved to Vancouver earlier this year looking to get back into the higher education industry after a year-long hiatus trying out private sector recruitment. As it turned out, I really missed working with students so I am very excited to be back promoting higher education pathways.

Where are you from originally then? 
I consider myself a Calgarian, but my hometown is Charlottetown, PEI.

What did you study at university?
I completed a Bachelor of Arts in Economics at the University of Calgary. The bulk of my upper-year electives were in behavioural and experimental economics. It basically shows that economic theories based on rational decision-making don’t actually predict much in the real world. Humans aren’t as rational as we like to think we are.

What are you most excited about in this role?
It’s a very exciting time to be a part of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences. With the new program taking off, there’s a lot of great energy in the building and it feels like a good time for me to lay the groundwork for new recruitment initiatives. I am also excited to meet incredibly bright students, and get to know them from the start to the end of the recruitment cycle.

What advice would you share with students who are thinking about applying for the Entry-to-Practice PharmD program?
Educate yourself on the career options in Pharmacy. You’ll be surprised to learn that there are so many different pathways you can take. Having an understanding of the profession, our program, and the academic requirements to get there will help you set realistic expectations. Aside from the required coursework for admission, take electives that you’ll actually enjoy, not ones you think will look “better” on your transcript. Having that balance between academics, hobbies, and extracurriculars will most likely help you to get better grades, and become more well-rounded.

How can prospective students set themselves apart in the application process?
While grades are important, the crucial piece of the application process is the Multi-Mini Interview (MMI). This is your opportunity to stand out and to leave a lasting impression on the Faculty. It’s hard to give specific advice on how to do this, but there are MMI prep workshops out there. Mentally prepare for the intensity of the interviews, and show your confidence.

What do you do in your spare time? 
If I’m not in the office, or out getting my ice cream fix, you can usually find me picnicking in a park, biking/running/walking along the seawall, or scuba diving around Horseshoe Bay and the Howe Sound. By next year, I hope to own all of my dive gear so that I can volunteer as a diver with the Vancouver Aquarium.

What are you most looking forward to this fall?
I am looking forward to experiencing the recruitment cycle from start to finish, and organizing the MMIs!

If you have questions about applying for the Entry-to-Practice PharmD program, or would just like to chat about whether the program is the right fit for you, Carol is the person to talk to. You can join our bi-monthly Q&A sessions on Facebook, book in for an advising appointment, or meet Carol at a Program Information Evening.

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