Pharmacists and Phinances!

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Interview with Dr. Tim Ulbrich, PharmD, RPh Tim Ulbrich is a professor of pharmacy practice and associate dean of student success at Northeast Ohio Medial University (NEOMED) College of Pharmacy. He graduated from Ohio Northern University with his Doctor of Pharmacy and completed residency training in community/ambulatory care at The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy. After paying off more than $200,000 in non-mortgage debt, Tim is working to empower pharmacists and pharmacy students to take control of their financial future. He is the creator of the Your Financial Pharmacist blog, co-host of Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast and co-author of Seven Figure Pharmacist: How to Maximize Your Income, Eliminate Debt and Create Wealth. Questions? Comments? Recommend someone for an interview? Contact us [e-mail] or find us on twitter @twopillspodcast! Highlights (full transcript at www.twopillspodcast.com): One of the mentors in a faculty development session to the residents discussed evidence based teaching. In school, we always heard about evidence based medicine and evidence-based patient care, but I had never really thought about approaching teaching in a scholarly way. For me, that was a fundamental shift. It was no longer about coming into the classroom and being a sage on the stage and everyone was just going to absorb all that great knowledge that I had. For me, that was a shift to seek out the best practices in active learning, team-based learning, and problem-based learning. For me, it's all about creating a learning environment that is adaptable to the styles of the people in the room. It focuses on them as the learners and takes the focus off me as the educator. What I've come to realize is that can look different in any given class or level of learner or size of the class. Flexibility in the classroom for me is important. I have this topic and this amount of time and that's important, but I also need to be able to be ready to pivot. If I am in the classroom and I see that things are not going well or that we need to engage in the material in a different way, then I think we need to make a move. That has really become my style as I've become more confident and comfortable in the classroom. I really try to get rid of the focus off of myself. I really try to shift the focus to the learners in that setting. My vision was to create this community of pharmacists who learned together and didn't have to feel like they were alone. It's kind of an unsaid story that you make a great income, so don't worry about the financial piece. As I shared my story and was vulnerable with my story, people were saying-that's me! I think I gave people permission to say I'm stressed out about this and this is hard. Once we give permission to have that conversation, that's when we start to work towards solutions. When I think about progression, I think about the first year taking apart the anatomy of a student loan. Understanding the basics of interest and how it's calculated, budgeting, and goal setting. You then start to layer on topics throughout the second, third, and fourth year. We can be a little more proactive rather than reactive instead of just talking to students when they graduate. If we are doing it along the way, then we can tie it to career discussions. We have a professional development advising team. Now, they can fold personal finance into all of these broader career discussions. If there is no personal finance discussion at your institution currently, the easiest place to start is to do a Capstone or to tie it to a student organization. Maybe you implement a personal finance elective and better yet implement a longitudinal progressive course across the curriculum. When I can see the student take a deep breath and realize that they can see the whole picture and they feel like they have clarity around the path that they should take to get there. To me, I walk