The St. Louis College of Pharmacy ran two programs this summer geared toward minority high school students interested in pursuing a career in health care.
Jonathan Anderson, a participant in the Walgreens/St. Louis College of Pharmacy Career Explorers Program, said, “It was a great program. It was a life changing program for me.” Anderson is now a Walgreens pharmacist and a graduate of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy.
Anderson added, “I was thinking about doing medicine, but I really wouldn’t have known anything about pharmacy or what a pharmacist did without the program.”
The Career Explorers Program is a collaboration between the St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Walgreens Pharmacy. Although geared toward minority students, the 20-day program accepts 25 rising juniors and seniors of all races and ethnicities.
Now in its 12th year, this program has students split their time between pharmacy-related classes at the college and at a local Walgreens working as pharmacy technicians and assistants to the pharmacists. At the end of the program, the students receive a stipend and are certified as pharmacy technicians.
The other program is called the BESt Pharmacy Summer Institute. Named for the program’s partnership between Barnes-Jewish Hospital, Express Scripts and St. Louis College of Pharmacy, the program has just completed its fifth year.
This year, BESt accepted 52 local rising sophomores, juniors and seniors with multicultural backgrounds. Over a six-week period, these students took classes taught by college faculty members in math, science, English, and ACT/SAT preparation. The students received college credit for their classes, a stipend for their participation and are invited back to the program each summer until they graduate from high school.
