A summer at Johns Hopkins

By Ryan Haumschild

Ryan Haumschild (center) completed a competitive internship in pharmacy this summer at Johns Hopkins.

Third-year pharmacy student Ryan Haumschild successfully competed for a coveted summer internship opportunity at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Selected through an application and interview process, he was one of 15 pharmacy students selected for a summer pharmacy internship from schools throughout the country. He encourages his UF classmates to seek competitive internships with a report from his experience:

The pharmacy internship program at The Johns Hopkins Hospital was very structured in that we had clinical pharmacy discussion forums every Monday and journal club every Wednesday. We also had several opportunities to have lunch with the director of pharmacy, who had just won the 2011 Harvey A. K. Whitney award from the American Society of Health System Pharmacy. It was interesting learning what the clinical pharmacists did on a daily basis in therapeutic practice areas such as critical care, internal medicine, psychiatry, emergency medicine, oncology and cardiology. As pharmacy students, we were permitted to shadow the clinical pharmacists during rounds and see them provide pharmacotherapy interventions to improve health outcomes.

Johns Hopkins has one of the largest residency programs in the nation, comprising 23 pharmacy residents. After our first week, the department of pharmacy held a resident–pharmacy student “Meet and Greet,” where we had an opportunity to speak with the pharmacy residents and find out how to become a competitive applicant for a residency program. This also gave us time to network with residents and set up on-call shadowing experiences.

My main area of interest is pharmacy administration. Before attending pharmacy school at UF, I received my Master of Business Administration degree. At Johns Hopkins, I wanted to combine my clinical education here at Florida with my background in business. The director of ambulatory care within the department of pharmacy was assigned to be my preceptor. He assigned projects that challenged me not only from a business perspective, but from a clinical one as well. The capstone project I worked on the most at Johns Hopkins was setting up pharmacy services for a hepatitis C clinic. It was my responsibility to work with the practitioners from the departments of medicine and pharmacy to see how they would be treating the patients. After acquiring all the details about the clinic and how care would be delivered, I prepared a financial analysis that would determine profitability at various capture rates. Based upon my analysis and with the help of the department of pharmacy staff, Johns Hopkins decided to move forward with the pharmacy services initiative. This will include a clinical pharmacist to consult with patients and monitor for drug interactions, while servicing the clinic with medications.

This internship experience left a lasting effect on me as a University of Florida student, and I feel I was able to make an impact on The Johns Hopkins Hospital to improve their patient-centered care.

All about internships

Pharmacy students can find summer internship opportunities through professional newsletters and national pharmacy organizations. The UF College of Pharmacy is also positioned to offer a wide range of research opportunities to its student-pharmacists. “The availability of research experiences for Pharm.D. students is mandated in the college’s accreditation standards and is required criteria for graduating students seeking academic honors,” said William Millard, Ph.D., an associate executive dean at the college. “We are especially proud when students like Ryan are successful in earning a research or internship experience in a highly competitive national program like Johns Hopkins.”