The compounding lab at the Lozier Center for Pharmacy Sciences and Education has all the equipment and components to teach UNMC’s future pharmacists the core pharmaceutical skill at hand.
But today, the UNMC College of Pharmacy’s Amber Hawk set out a few unconventional ingredients for this special group.
Smarties candies. Strawberry, orange and lime gelatin powder. Creamy white frosting.
With mortar and pestle sets to crush the candy wafers as a pharmacist would a pill. And a weigh boat for mixing.
For these future professionals – 12- to 15-year-olds from the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Midlands-Millard Central Club – this experience showed them a little about the potential of becoming a pharmacist.
The UNMC High School Alliance welcomed the 10 students to campus last week as part of a pilot summer camp. Across four mornings on campus, the students learned about DNA and genetics, respiratory therapy and radiologic technology, occupational therapy and creating gels, all through hands-on activities.
Hawk, the college of pharmacy’s director of recruitment and admissions, gave the students an introduction to the pharmacy profession.
Is there a future pharmacist in the group? Well, Hawk – one of UNMC’s latest Gold U Award-winning employees – did highlight 100-plus different pharmacy careers students can pursue.
As she prepared them to enter the compounding lab, Hawk previewed the experience waiting around the corner by saying, “You get to be the pharmacist …”
Once at their compounding stations, the students took quickly to the sweet task.
Hawk introduced a mortar and pestle and the Smartie pills. “You’ll just crush it up.”
One student mixed white, orange and yellow Smarties, another the purple grape and green lime candies. Through the “smooshing process,” as the High School Alliance teacher called it, the Smarties turned to fine powder.
In the pharmacy profession, there is such a thing as adding flavor and color, like pink bubble gum to cough syrup. That’s called an “excipient,” Hawk explained, dropping a vocabulary word of the day as she walked students through crushing, mixing and stirring that mimicked real pharmacists’ skills.
This time, the compounding produced a sugary, colored paste. By the end, Hawk confirmed the experiment’s clear endgame.
“So it is all edible.”
Where real pharmacists would definitely NOT sample, the visiting students got that chance.
One tried the concoction and nodded. “It’s good,” she said.
“Yeah, it tastes like banana, too,” her station neighbor said.
That student said the pharmacy experience had been the best part of the summer camp so far, along with holding a sheep’s heart.
“It was fun, and we got to learn a lot,” she said.
Morgan McCulley, director of STEM & arts curriculum/programming for Boys & Girls Clubs of the Midlands, said the summer camp was great to pique the members’ curiosity about health care professions. Having the youth participate in the relevant, engaging, hands-on activities, she said, quickly resulted in members gaining a new confidence about seeing how they could pursue a career in the medical field.
“We’re very grateful for the relationship we have with UNMC,” McCulley said, “and the ability to provide such an incredible opportunity to our members.”
Jaynie Bird, a High School Alliance teacher with UNMC, said the program was meant to show students all the possibilities that health care can offer.
After piloting the summer camp this year, Bird said, the hope is that it can blossom into something bigger next year.