Math majors who love their jobs

Click on the name to read the person's profile.

Ellen Lentz helps researchers design experiments
to test medicines for animals and people.
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Bjorn Roche launched his own music software company. His software, which he started writing as a hobby, can be used for music recording, editing, mixing, and CD mastering.
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Mike Hughes oversees a greeting card company's people in six states. He also studies the mix of world cultures in each area to adapt the selection of cards to countryside or city stores, party stores or dollar stores.
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Elizabeth Hunt Bradford's job is to dream up clever ways for an airline to run better.

Real world math

Watch fun videos on The Futures Channel about all kinds of careers that use math, such as architect, bat scientist, bike designer, exotic animals manager, undersea treasure hunter, and more.

Follow a hospital pharmacist – a STEM career glimpse

by Peter Ambrose, Pharm.D. (Doctor of Pharmacy)












as told to Caroline Hatton


If you like helping people, you might love to be a pharmacist.

You may have been inside your neighborhood pharmacy, and seen people distribute medicines and give advice from behind a counter. Some of them are pharmacy technicians. One of them is the pharmacist in charge. Such a pharmacist, who works in the community, is called something very clever… a community pharmacist!

But did you know that some pharmacists work in hospitals?

They also distribute medicines. They advise not only sick people (patients), but also doctors and nurses. This is because pharmacists are experts about medicines: what they are, how they work, and how best to use them to help people by curing disease or making life better.

Hospital pharmacists do a large variety of tasks. What might be one of those tasks? How exactly would it get done? To find out, let’s follow one pharmacist. She joins a doctor and nurse at the bedside of a patient, a teen athlete in pain.

The nurse takes the athlete’s temperature. He has a high fever. His right leg is red and swollen.

The doctor has examined him, ordered a pain killer, reviewed lab tests results, and identified (diagnosed) the problem as cellulitis (pronounced SELL-u-LIGHT-iss), an infection under the skin. It is caused by bacteria and can spread among athletes.

The boy’s infection is serious, so the doctor decides to treat it with a powerful medicine called an aminoglycoside (pronounced uh-MEE-no-GLY-coe-side) antibiotic. Like most medicines, it has many effects, some wanted, some not. Giving the patient too much may cause him to go deaf or it may damage his kidneys, which must work properly for him to stay alive and healthy. Too little medicine may not keep the infection from endangering his life.

Someone must take responsibility for figuring out how much medicine the nurse should give the patient. The doctor turns to the pharmacist to ask her to make a plan.

The ball is now in the pharmacist’s court. She knows exactly what to do. First, find out how fast the patient’s body will get rid of the medicine—how well his kidneys are working to remove water, waste, and medicines from his body. A special blood test (serum creatinine concentration) can reveal this.

The pharmacist walks to the pharmacy office closest to this patient’s room. At the computer, she pulls up his personal information (chart) and orders the test. She asks the lab staff to call her as soon as the result is known. A lab team member will come take a blood sample from the patient and bring it back to the lab for testing.

After the pharmacist works on other things for a few hours, her pager beeps: the test result is ready! She reads it in the patient’s chart. She can see his age and weight.

Using a math formula in a computer program she wrote and saved before, she figures out how fast the medicine will flow out through the patient’s kidneys—today. Now the pharmacist can calculate how much medicine to give (the dose) to have, in the patient’s body, the maximum amount that will be safe.

She orders exactly how much the nurse must give and how often, for example “50 milligrams every 8 hours intravenously” (injected in a vein). This is not the same as giving twice as much, half as often, which would not be right for this patient.


The pharmacist also orders more lab tests, to measure the amount of medicine in the blood, at its highest (half an hour after the patient received it) and lowest (half an hour before the next dose). She asks the lab team to take the blood samples at specific times.

For days, ten or more if necessary, the pharmacist follows this boy’s treatment. She keeps adjusting the dose, based on blood levels, kidney function, the nurse’s reports, and the doctor’s lead. Her calculations help the treatment work better so the patient can go home several days earlier.

The pharmacist is a key member of the health team. So is the patient, following orders and maintaining a winning attitude.

This may sound like walking a tightrope, hand in hand with the patient. Team work makes it a thrill and a triumph, every step of the way. And this is only one of many things that pharmacists work on with others.

ABOUT PETER AMBROSE

Peter is a hospital pharmacist, a Doctor of Pharmacy, and a Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at the School of Pharmacy of the University of California at San Francisco. As an enthusiastic teacher, he’s shared his wisdom and experience with students as far as his hometown of Long Beach (California), nearby Los Angeles, and Tokyo. As a sports fan, he’s had adventures that not many pharmacists have experienced: follow him behind the scenes at the Olympics.

LINKS

* Watch a video about hospital and health system pharmacists who LOVE their jobs.

* For more about what is uniquely exciting about hospital pharmacists’ careers, how they spend their work time, and what they like best and least, read the first two pages of these survey results.

* About pharmacists

Hospital pharmacists do what Peter described and much more. They tend to find their work life varied, challenging, and satisfying. Community pharmacists spend most of their time helping patients, making a difference one person at a time. Pharmacists can also choose careers in industry or government, research or business, even sports. Pharmacists have among the highest starting salaries of college graduates in the U.S.

* For a quick-and-easy overview of pharmacist careers, click on "Listen to the podcast..." at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. It’s an introduction to the required schooling, a day-in-the-life of a pharmacist, salary info, where pharmacists work, and the fantastic job market in the years ahead.

* For another friendly overview, visit ScienceBuddies.org.

* Is pharmacy right for you? Get help finding the answer at the website, "Pharmacy is Right for Me".

* Watch videos of pharmacist Kate James:

- on why to become a pharmacist (hint: Kate loves science and people)

- on how much money pharmacists make

- on how to become a pharmacist

- on the pros and cons of a pharmacy career

* Read an interview of a research pharmacist (why she chose her career, her workday, what she likes best and least about work, career goals, hobbies). 

* Pharmacist was the second-best-paid job for women in 2011.

Updated January 18, 2012

A STEM Careers Blog. Why now? Why me?

Because in July 2010, I will appear once more at Tech Trek, the math/science camps for 7th-grade girls. Trekkers, it’s for you that I launch this blog now.

I get invited because I’m a scientist. At Tech Trek, I join the Professional Women’s Night, when campers meet women who are math or science professionals, and I make presentations. For this I thank the camp directors, Carol Holzgrafe and Colleen Briner-Schmidt, a science teacher.

As a scientist, I help test athletes for prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids. I’ve worked at three Olympics.

One year at Tech Trek, Colleen the science teacher asked me whether I’d had to surmount obstacles to become a scientist because I’m a woman; whether as a girl, I was ever discouraged from being a scientist. Were there few women scientists around, if any, when I was young?

No, no, and no! Quite the contrary. My mother was a pharmacist like my father. I knew many women who were pharmacists or medical doctors, and one who was a physics researcher.

Plus, every day on my way to school in Paris (France) where I grew up, I walked past a building…


…with a stone plaque on the wall that said, “Here, Marie Curie discovered radium.”


Marie Curie was a scientist. She discovered radium and polonium, two chemical elements, and studied the kinds of rays of energy or particles they give off, or radioactivity. As a result, our understanding of matter and energy, and science itself changed forever. Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes for her work.
So I always knew that women could be scientists.

Speaking of role models, Colleen the science teacher knows a boy who, when he was five years old, loved to watch Sesame Street. Astronaut Sally Ride appeared on it. He loved her, and oh he would’ve loved to be an astronaut, but he didn’t think he could, because he thought it was a woman’s job.

Of course, that’s not true, and the boy soon learned this. Astronauts are chosen for what they can do. It doesn’t matter if they’re men or women.

Isn’t it amazing what we think we can or cannot do, what we’re even capable of imagining, depending on what we experience as we grow up?

So I start this blog to help girls and boys unleash their imaginations and potential, by helping them follow STEM professionals at work, do fun activities, and link to valuable resources.

LINKS

● For more on Marie Curie, such as tons of details, photos, and quotes from her autobiographical notes, see “Marie Curie and the science of radioactivity” by the American Institute of Physics - Center for the History of Physics.

● Read a Smithsonian Magazine article on Marie Curie's passion for science, despite the barriers she faced because she was a woman.


● A new play, Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie, written by the actor and director Alan Alda, debuts November 9, 2011. Read his interview.

● What are some of the careers that match your interests and favorite school subjects? Find out at this career info site. Examples of STEM careers are under Math, Science, Computers, Managing Money, and several other subjects.

● If you are curious about a particular STEM career and would like a quick-and-easy overview, look for that career at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center and click on "Listen to the podcast..." about it. For example, the Veterinarian podcast offers a rounded overview of the profession, the required schooling, specialties, a day-in-the-life of a veterinarian, salary info, where veterinarians work, and the awesome job market in the years ahead.

Back to blog

Updated November 9, 2011