Student spotlight: Meet Austin Dudzinski

Education is one of the four pillars of UNMC’s mission, and our students are the lifeblood of that aspect of campus life. In UNMC Today’s Student Spotlight, we get to know some of these students, who will become tomorrow’s health care professionals. Today we meet:

• Name: Austin Dudzinski
• Hometown: Omaha
• Program/Year: Fourth-year pharmacy student

List three songs on your playlist.

• “Some Devil,” Dave Matthews
• “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” Neil Young
• “Going Down for Real,” Flo Rida

What sparked your interest in pharmacy?
Medicine has always been in my family. My father was a pharmacist, my mother was a nurse, my late grandfather was a family physician, one of my uncles is a family physician, and my other uncle is a dentist. Naturally, medicine has always been interesting to me. From a young age, I enjoyed biology and chemistry in school, and my interests evolved from those general fields of science to specifically human biology and then medicine. In college, I was pre-medicine/pre-pharmacy, and I decided at the last minute to go with pharmacy. I’m very pleased with my decision! I love the role that pharmacists can take in the general care of patients, and the vital place that they share on the health care team!

Your favorite study snack is:
Baked Cheetos or my wife’s chocolate chip pumpkin bread.

Your favorite app is:
Pharmacist’s Letter App

Three things people may not know about you:

• I play the guitar. I have been playing since I was 15 years old and love it more and more each day. It is a great way to relieve stress from the worries of school, and it’s also an awesome time playing songs around a bonfire with friends.
• I love being outside. I owned a small landscaping company in high school that primarily installed mulch, planted plants and built minor retaining walls and patios. Now that I’m a homeowner, I love taking care of the plants around my house and gardening. I have a big spaghetti squash in my garden that’s almost ready for picking.
• If I wasn’t pursuing a career in pharmacy, I would probably be a teacher. I love the feeling that I get when I explain a difficult concept to someone and see the look in their eyes that says, “That makes sense now. I never thought of it that way.”