U-M Pharmacy Students Attend the 2015 APhA Annual Meeting and Exposition

From March 27-30, 2015, students from the College of Pharmacy’s chapter of APhA-ASP traveled to San Diego, CA in order to attend the 2015 APhA Annual Meeting and Exposition. This year, the theme of the meeting was “Advancing as One.” The idea around this theme is to provide the tools for those in our profession to advance both individually and to advance the profession itself as we work towards the achievement of provider status.

The meeting centered around four themes to provide attendees with the tools to advance: education, advocacy, networking, and discovery. The meeting itself provided a variety of programming provided by both APhA and APhA-ASP in order to reinforce these themes to the 7,000+ attendees. There were numerous different educational opportunities that updated both pharmacists and student pharmacists on current practices in the field in a variety of areas such as biologics, oral oncology therapy, and much more. Furthermore, there were different sessions that focused on advocacy, such as the House of Delegates sessions, where the policies that the organizations wanted to adopt moving forward were developed, debated, and voted on. A variety of networking opportunities were available as well, with a variety of receptions and sessions that represented a large network of organizations, even outside APhA and APhA-ASP as a whole. Finally, the Exhibition floor provided attendees a chance to discover various career opportunities, along with new products that would be hitting the drug market soon.

As student pharmacists, we generally attended most of the programming put on by APhA-ASP. Their programming for student pharmacists included workshops for leadership, career development, tools for how to both better one’s chapter of APhA-ASP, and tips on how to work with your state legislature. All of the student pharmacists from our chapter that attended found the sessions to be very beneficial and enlightening towards their professional development.

“It was really exciting to meet student pharmacists and practicing pharmacists from across the country who were passionate about ways to impact the profession. We were able to participate in a lot of different professional development workshops and attend lectures on current pharmacy topics related to law, changes in legislature, and new medications on the horizon,” states Millie Mo, PharmD’17. Ultimately, the Annual Meeting and Exposition provided the attendees with excitement for the future of pharmacy and with new ideas to bring back to our chapter of APhA-ASP for the next academic year.