Pharmacy competes for applicants against medicine, dentistry and other STEM-oriented careers. Leveraging community and institutional relationships provides an opportunity to capture the imagination of students and their parents in K-12 and at undergraduate programs thereby expanding the pool of prospective applicants and generating excitement about careers in pharmacy. Community engagement, research partnerships, and faculty collaboration all drive recruitment and build a positive impression of pharmacy and the rewarding and lucrative career opportunities it offers. Here’s how we do it. Diabetic Halloween educates Baltimore City elementary school kids and their parents. Math and science skills are augmented through tutoring in A Bridge to Academic Excellence (ABAE) offered to middle and high school students. Drug abuse awareness programs reach high school students. Undergraduate research internships (for example Meyerhoff Scholars) and instructional collaborations (for example, enrichment of a prerequisite physics course at a community college with concepts relevant to pharmacy) build symbiotic partnerships with feeder colleges and universities. Outcomes research honed with community input provides a tool to reach underserved and non-traditional students previously unaware of pharmacy. To assess the success of these organic and strategic engagement efforts on long-term recruitment and application rates requires rethinking admissions questions to capture more information on how prospective students learned about pharmacy. Utilizing established customer relationship management metrics to learn how prospects form impressions of the pharmacy profession can guide future engagement efforts, although the results may not yield results for 5-10 years.

Read More: http://www.ajpe.org/doi/full/10.5688/ajpe805S2