IPPE

As part of the pharmacy curriculum, we have to do 100 hours of Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experience (IPPE) for the first two years of pharmacy school. This involves us students getting matched with a contracted practice site by some crazy algorithm program that not a single professor at our college can accurately describe.

The program allows us to choose which sites we want to go to in preferential order, but the problem is there's only a total of eight rotations in my college city. That means that less than 10% of my class will get to do their IPPE in our city this summer, which, if my math is correct, means over 90% of us will have to go out of town.

Not that that's a big deal, many of the practice sites are in or near our respective hometowns, but what peeves me is this - they asked us to tell them where we wanted to go, and that they would do everything in their power to get those sites available to us. They didn't though. The list of practice sites are the same as they were last year. Not a single new site was added.

Unfortunately for me, my hometown isn't one of the towns that was on the list last year. I told them about four different sites near my hometown that I would be willing to do my IPPE in this summer, and not a single one became a site that's available. This seems to be a tad bit insane, considering there really isn't another pharmacy school near my hometown, so it's not like those places need to reserve spots for other colleges. I really, truly think that the professor that was in charge of contacting these places really just didn't care one way or the other.

My guess would be that she sent an email to the HR department or something and then just waited for a response. If she didn't get one, oh well. If she did, cool. I'd be willing to bet her total amount of time and effort put into getting us practice sites amounted to the same effort I put into this blog.

It looks like I'm going to have to battle for one of those eight spots in my current city, and if my luck in the past is any indicator of how that will go, I'll end up in East-Jesus nowhere.