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Professional Engagement

By Kinjal Parikh posted 04-01-2014 12:59

  

When people ask me how I decided to become a pharmacist, my answer is really quite boring. Reflecting back on my teen years, I was like most 13 year olds where my mind was never in the present always fast-forwarding into visions of the future. However, I was that nerd that took an eighth grade homework assignment for researching future careers very seriously. High school was around the corner and I had to know what “track” to take and of course it’s easier to plan when you have an end goal in mind. A little bit of the decision aligned with stereotypes too. My parents had struggled in my youth to provide me with every opportunity for success including moving from India to America. A career in healthcare would give me job satisfaction, security, and, ideally, the balance I needed to raise a family.

Throughout my short professional journey, I was always involved. I worked off of my own “success” template of working hard and taking advantage of the opportunities available during high school, college, and pharmacy school. I was active in student organizations, interning, volunteering, traveling with medical mission trips, and I genuinely believed this was professional engagement. Involvement in these activities was also motivated by a selfishness to fulfill my joy of staying busy and bolster my CV to appear well-rounded enough to entice someone to invite me on-site for an interview for whatever opportunity was next. If you ask students, residents, and post-residency graduates what professional engagement means, you will often get a laundry list of all the activities they are involved with to fulfill the need for “looking good” on paper. Landing my current job has been the pinnacle of achieving a pseudo-defined long-term goal I set as a 13-year old. Being about 9 months out of my PGY2 oncology residency, I realized I needed to reassess my tactics and what professional engagement really means in a more global sense of my career. When I completed residency, two pages of my CV were easily erased with things that were no longer relevant and I felt a bit naked with nothing to show for myself after the laborious years spent coming to this achievement.

Now what?

When I realized that it’s not a list of every activity related to the field of pharmacy, some questions start to arise: How do I make my mark? What am I working towards next? These questions and a new title that’s not transitory for one or two years have allowed me to finally catch up to the present and explore what professional engagement really is. Though there are always yearly evaluations and personal goals to help nudge me along, I am enjoying becoming more proficient at my job and taking this time to think of specific things that interest me. I explore short-term opportunities and network with others to discover all the directions that I can go without feeling a pressure to constantly achieve and compete with anyone for the next educational milestone. Though the nature of my job description dictates the majority of my time, it’s now time to also get in touch with what I like to do and find what drives me within my profession to set my next goals. 

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