March 2019

Hello everyone!!

In the past month, so much has happened in terms of the masters in pharmacology program I am currently enrolled in. Our biggest exam of the year, the dreaded cumulative NBME shelf exam, occurred last week, graduation is only a month away, and people are gearing up to do bigger and better things next year. For some of us, it includes working and building our skills even more to gain a wide breadth of experiences. For others, it includes medical school! And for other people, it includes doing some meaningful volunteer work with organizations that they are passionate about. I fall into the working group of people, and for the past few weeks, I have been exploring career opportunities for the upcoming year as I complete applications for medical school for the year after. I am super excited for this opportunity, because as a premed student, the traditional corporate job isn’t something many of us get to experience, seeing that our career path is pretty different from other professions. As I look to see what excites me in the workplace, I have been looking to my volunteer experiences from the past month to gain inspiration. I have been working with Second Harvest Food Bank (as I did last semester as well) and in the various roles I have taken on for the organizations, I have found that I excel at leadership and organization. Linking together a sense of purpose with those skills has made me even better at them and more invested in those opportunities, which is why I actually plan on finding a job that has a strong sense of community service and giving back to the communities in which it is a part of. I would love to see companies actually have a volunteering component to their infrastructure and have that be a common goal of the group as a whole. I look forward to reviewing the opportunities and keeping you guys updated on the progress!

Best,

Lekha Thangada

# of Community Service Hours (Total): 13 hours